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John  Galen  Howard 
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HOME  UNIVERSITY  LIBRARY 
OF  MODERN  KNOWLEDGE 

No.  48 

Editor  ts 

HERBERT    FISHER,  M.A.,  F.B.A. 
PROF.  GILBERT  MURRAY,  LiTT.D., 

LL.D.,  F.B.A. 

PROF.  J.  ARTHUR    THOMSON,  M.A. 
PROF.  WILLIAM  T.  BREWSTER,  M.A. 


THE  HOME  UNIVERSITY  LIBRARY 
OF  MODERN  KNOWLEDGE 

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LITERATURE  AND  ART 

Already   Published 

SHAKESPEARE By  JOHN  MASZFIELD 

ENGLISH    LITERATURE- 
MODERN  By  G.  H.  MAIR 

LANDMARKS     IN     FRENCH 
LITERATURE By  G.  L.  STRACHEY 

ARCHITECTURE By  W.  R.  LETHABY 

ENGLISH    LITERATURE- 
MEDIEVAL  By  W.  P.  Ker 

THE    ENGLISH    LANGUAGE  .   .  By  L.  PEARSALL  SMITH 

GREAT  AMERICAN  WRITERS  .  By  W.  P.  TRENT  and  JOHN 

ERSKINE 

Future  Issues 

THE   WRITING   OF   ENGLISH  .   By  W.  T.  BREWSTEK 
ITALIAN  ART  OF  THE  RENAIS 
SANCE   By  ROGER  E.  FRY 

GREAT  WRITERS  OF  RUSSIA  .  By  C.  T.  HAGBERT  WRIGHT 
ANCIENT  ART  AND  RITUAL  .  By  Miss  JANE  HARRISON 
THE  RENAISSANCE By  MRS.  R.  A.  TAYLOR 


GREAT    AMERICAN 
WRITERS 


BY 
W.   P.  TRENT 

PROFESSOR    OF    ENGLISH    LITERATURE,   COLUMBIA    UNIVERSITY 
AND 

JOHN    ERSKINE 

ASSOCIATE    PROFESSOR    OF    ENGLISH,  COLUMBIA    UNIVERSITY 


NEW  YORK 
HENRY   HOLT  AND   COMPANY 

LONDON 
WILLIAMS   AND    NORGATE 


COPYRIGHT,  1912, 

BY 

HENRY    HOLT   AND    COMPANY 


REP.  GEN.  Lift. 

ACCESS.  Ha     , 


GIFT 

THE  UNIVERSITY  PRESS,   CAMBRIDGE,    U.S.A. 


qis 


CONTENTS 

CHAP.  PAGE 

I     FRANKLIN,  BROCKDEN  BROWN,  AND  IRVING  .     .  7 

II     WILLIAM  CULLEN  BRYANT 27 

III  JAMES  FENIMOHE  COOPER 38 

IV  NATHANIEL  HAWTHORNE 57 

V    EDGAR  ALLAN  POE 85 

VI    THE  TRANSCENDENTALISTS 108 

VII    THE  NEW  ENGLAND  POETS 134 

VIII    THE  HISTORIANS 169 

IX    WEBSTER  AND  LINCOLN 187 

X    HARRIET  BEECHER  STOWE 197 

XI     WALT  WHITMAN 212 

XII     BRET  HARTE  AND  MARK  TWAIN 231 

BIBLIOGRAPHY 251 

INDEX  253 


R842815 


GREAT  AMERICAN 
WRITERS 

CHAPTER  I 

FRANKLIN,  BROCKDEN  BROWN,  AND  IRVING 

AMERICAN  literature  in  the  most  liberal 
sense  of  the  term  is  now  a  little  more  than 
three  hundred  years  old.  In  the  strictest 
sense  comprising  only  the  books  that  are  still 
somewhat  widely  read,  it  is  not  half  so  old. 
Historians  may  discuss  and  students  may  read 
or  skim  a  few  poets  and  historians  and  theo 
logians;  Crevecceur's  Letters  of  an  American 
Farmer  and  John  Woolman's  Journal  de 
servedly  win  an  admirer  here  and  there;  a 
handful  of  people  know  that  no  American 
and  few  men  anywhere  ever  possessed  a  more 
powerful  mind  than  that  of  Jonathan  Ed 
wards;  but  practically  only  one  book  written 
by  an  American  before  the  close  of  the  eight 
eenth  century  has  sufficient  excellence  and 
popularity  to  rank  as  a  classic.  Oddly 
enough,  this  book,  Benjamin  Franklin's 
Autobiography,  was  first  read  in  an  imperfect 
French  version,  won  much  of  its  fame  in  a 
somewhat  emasculated  English  form,  and 

7 


8         GREAT  AMERICAN  WRITERS 

was  not  known  in  its  native  raciness  until 
1868.  Its  author,  although  his  writings  fill 
ten  volumes,  was  far  enough  from  being  a 
professional  writer;  but  his  is  the  first  name 
with  which  a  popular  account  of  the  achieve 
ments  of  American  men  of  letters  need  begin. 
In  the  one  hundred  and  twenty-two  years 
that  have  elapsed  since  his  death  the  volume 
of  American  literature  has  increased  in  at 
least  equal  proportion  with  the  growth  of  the 
country  in  population  and  wealth  and  power, 
yet  among  the  thousands  of  authors  whose 
works  constitute  this  literature  there  is  no 
more  interesting  and  versatile  and  humane 
personality  than  his.  The  best  element  in 
their  work,  as  in  his,  is  a  certain  "citizen 
note,"  a  certain  adaptability  to  the  intellec 
tual,  moral,  and  esthetic  needs  of  a  large  de 
mocracy.  When  this  is  said,  one  perceives 
how  it  is  that  one  may  also  say  that  America 
has  no  more  produced  an  author  of  the  range 
and  quality  of  Dryden  than  she  has  produced 
one  of  the  range  and  quality  of  Milton  or 
Shakespeare. 

Franklin's  life  is  too  well  known,  too  inti 
mately  connected  with  the  history  of  his 
country  and  his  age,  to  require  extended 
treatment  here.  We  think  of  him  primarily 
as  a  Philadelphian,  but  his  birth  at  Boston  on 
January  17, 1706,  connects  him  with  that  New 


FRANKLIN,  BROWN,  AND  IRVING     9 

England  which,  whether  under  the  domina 
tion  of  the  Congregational  divines,  such  as 
the  Mathers,  or  under  the  leadership  of  Emer 
son  and  his  fellow  Transcendentalists,  was, 
until  the  present  generation,  the  most  pro 
ductive  and  important  literary  section  of  the 
country.  In  his  shrewdness  and  his  practi 
cality  he  was  worthy  of  his  Puritan  birth; 
not  so  in  his  lack  of  spirituality  and  his  thor 
ough  this-worldliness.  Perhaps,  however,  a 
poetic  imagination  and  a  deep  religious  sense 
would  have  made  a  Franklin  of  whom  the 
world  would  have  stood  in  little  need — a 
Franklin  far  from  being  the  true  child  of  his 
utilitarian  century  and  the  first  exponent,  on 
a  broad  scale,  of  the  spirit  of  American  nation 
ality.  He  read  both  Bunyan  and  Defoe  in  his 
youth,  but  it  was  the  author  of  the  Essay  upon 
Projects  that  chiefly  impressed  him.  He  read 
Addison  also,  and  imitated  him  in  early 
essays.  With  such  masters  and  his  own  na 
tive  genius,  it  is  not  surprising  that,  given  the 
many  occasions  he  had  for  putting  his  pen  to 
use,  he  should  have  become  the  best  of  our 
early  prose-men,  a  master,  like  Lincoln  after 
him,  of  the  homely  vernacular. 

He  began  his  career  as  apprentice  to  his 
brother,  who  printed  the  New  England  Cour- 
ant.  He  was  already  in  touch  with  contem 
porary  British  literature,  already  a  liberal  in 


10       GREAT  AMERICAN  WRITERS 

thought,  already  possessed  of  practical  knowl 
edge  of  his  printer's  craft,  before  he  gave  his 
life  one  of  its  few  touches  of  real  romance  by 
running  away  to  Philadelphia  and  making 
his  entry,  in  a  rather  absurd  fashion,  before 
the  eyes  of  the  girl  he  was  afterwards  to 
marry.  Of  his  first  visit  to  England,  of  his 
subsequent  success  at  home  as  printer  and 
bookseller  and  editor,  of  his  civic  spirit, 
which  made  him  the  foremost  citizen  of  Phila 
delphia  and  helped  to  make  Philadelphia  it 
self  the  foremost  town  in  the  colonies,  of  his 
widely  read  almanacs,  of  his  schemes  for 
moral  betterment  and  of  his  services  as  a  pio 
neer  of  education,  of  his  scientific  experiments 
and  the  cosmopolitan  fame  they  brought 
him,  of  his  political  activities  at  home  and  his 
long  diplomatic  career  in  England  and  France 
— of  all  this  there  is  no  room  and  little  need 
to  speak.  He  was  much  more  than  an  Ameri 
can,  yet  always  an  American,  as  his  proud 
independence  and  his  keen,  racy  humor  suf 
fice  to  show.  He  was  much  more  than  a  mere 
provincial,  yet  his  character  was  in  the  main 
formed  amid  provincial  surroundings.  He 
excelled,  perhaps,  in  nothing  save  in  versatility 
and  in  a  positive  genius  for  the  useful  and  the 
practical,  yet  it  may  be  doubted  whether  any 
other  name  than  his  is  more  truly  represen 
tative  of  his  interesting  age.  In  his  writings 


FRANKLIN,  BROWN,  AND  IRVING    11 

that  age  and  the  man  himself  are  reflected 
with  a  rare  faithfulness,  all  the  rarer,  perhaps, 
because  he  took  so  little  thought  of  literary 
fame,  even  his  Autobiography  having  been 
designed  for  his  descendants  rather  than  for 
the  world. 

Besides  the  simple,  unaffected,  fascinating 
Autobiography,  which  was  left  incomplete,  the 
general  reader  will  almost  certainly  enjoy  the 
preface  to  Poor  Richard's  Almanac,  and  several 
of  the  shorter  papers,  or  occasional  trifles, 
such  as  the  Rules  for  Reducing  a  Great  Empire 
to  a  Small  One,  An  Edict  by  the  King  of  Prus 
sia,  The  Ephemera,  Franklin  and  the  Gout,  and 
the  like.  Students  of  history  and  science,  as 
well  as  those  readers  known  as  omnivorous, 
will  be  able  to  take  care  of  themselves  in  the 
vast  and  varied  domain,  or  wilderness,  of 
print  constituted  by  the  Works,  which  are  not 
even  yet  absolutely  complete.  One  bit  of 
counsel,  however,  may  not  be  deemed  super 
fluous,  even  by  such  experienced  readers.  It 
is  to  the  effect  that  Franklin's  humor,  knowl 
edge  of  the  world,  frankness  of  disposition, 
and  command  of  a  clear,  unpedantic  style 
made  him  one  of  the  best  letter-writers  of  an 
age  supreme  in  the  annals  of  epistolary  litera 
ture  in  English.  His  private  correspondence 
should  be  neglected  by  no  one  who  cares  for 
good  letters.  But  for  that  matter  there  is 


12        GREAT  AMERICAN  WRITERS 

little  the  wise  reader  who  wishes  to  know  all 
he  can  about  human  nature  will  neglect  in  the 
self-revealing  writings  of  one  of  the  most 
humane  personalities  of  whom  the  world  has 
any  record.  When  Franklin  died  at  Phila 
delphia  on  April  17,  1790,  he  closed  what 
still  remains,  perhaps,  the  most  truly  ex 
traordinary  and  full  career,  although  not  the 
greatest  and  most  inspiring,  ever  allotted  to  a 
citizen  of  the  new  world. 

The  first  real  American  man  of  letters  in  the 
professional  sense,  Charles  Brockden  Brown, 
had  not  begun  his  work  at  the  time  of  Frank 
lin's  death.  Brown  had  been  preceded  by 
several  capable  and  important  writers  of  the 
Revolutionary  period;  by  poets  like  Trum- 
bull,  Barlow,  and  Freneau,  by  writers  of  fic 
tion  like  Mrs.  Rowson, — whose  sentimental 
romance  Charlotte  Temple  is  still  read  in  un 
sophisticated  circles, — by  publicists  and  his 
torians,  but  by  no  writer  in  whom  the  public 
of  to-day  takes  any  genuine  interest.  Even 
Brown's  own  novels,  fairly  eminent  follower 
though  he  was  of  Mrs.  Radcliffe  and  Godwin, 
long  since  lost  the  little  vogue  they  once  pos 
sessed.  Yet,  whatever  his  present  reputation, 
it  remains  clear  that  the  American  novel  had 
its  serious  and  its  creditable  beginning  in  his 
books. 

Not  only  do  his  stories  stand  chronologi- 


FRANKLIN,  BROWN,  AND  IRVING    13 

cally  at  the  beginning  of  the  type,  but  they 
illustrate  what  were  to  be  the  qualities  of 
the  American  novel, — in  some  aspects,  of  all 
American  literature.  They  exhibited,  for 
example,  a  certain  gravity,  an  exclusive  rec 
ognition  of  the  seriousness  of  life,  which  colors 
even  the  romance  and  is  not  entirely  forgotten 
in  some  of  the  humor  of  America;  and  with 
this  seriousness  was  bound  up  an  intention  to 
be  of  service  to  the  community,  to  explore  life 
or  distribute  moral  ideas  for  the  public  good> 
— the  motive  of  most  American  prose  and 
verse.  This  intention  precludes  in  Brown's 
work  any  lightness  of  touch,  any  naturalness 
of  dialogue,  any  contemplation — in  the  phil 
osophical  sense — of  life.  He  illustrates  also 
the  American  avidity  for  old-world  culture; 
he  imported  some  of  the  English  radicalism 
of  the  late  eighteenth  century,  especially  of  his 
master  Godwin,  some  of  the  French  ideas  of 
government,  some  of  the  German  speculations 
in  mental  science  and  investigations  of  ab 
normal  psychology.  But  if  he  learned  from 
Europe,  he  also  gave  something  back.  He 
was  for  a  while  reckoned  greater  than  Cooper. 
His  books  were  in  every  circulating  library  in 
England.  Their  titles  were  so  familiar  that 
Walter  Scott,  in  Guy  Mannering,  named  one 
hero  Arthur  Mervyn  and  another  Brown. 
He  gave  the  American  landscape  and  the 


14       GREAT  AMERICAN  WRITERS 

American  Indian  their  first  foothold  in  popu 
lar  literature.  What  is  more,  his  stories  are 
full  of  American  ideas,  or,  at  least,  of  an 
American  point  of  view.  Shelley,  for  exam 
ple,  found  in  this  new-world  disciple  of  God 
win  something  he  never  found  in  Godwin 
himself.  Brown's  four  principal  stories,  so 
Peacock  tells  us,  were  those  which,  with 
Schiller's  Robbers  and  Goethe's  Faust,  took 
the  deepest  root  in  Shelley's  mind,  and  had 
the  strongest  influence  in  the  formation  of 
his  character. 

Brown's  career  was  a  natural  resultant  of 
his  temperament  and  of  the  times  in  which 
he  lived.  Born  in  Philadelphia  on  January  17, 
1771,  he  was  close  to  the  American  Revolu 
tion,  and  for  most  of  his  short  life  he  must 
have  moved  in  an  atmosphere  conducive  to 
radical  thinking  and  public  service.  That  his 
parents  were  of  Quaker  descent  accounts  for 
some  of  the  quiet  of  his  home,  but  he  was 
a  delicate,  thoughtful  boy  by  nature.  When 
his  parents  wished  to  walk  out  on  an  errand, 
it  was  enough  to  leave  him  with  a  book; 
and  he  was  known  to  study  the  map  on  the 
wall  with  such  interest  as  to  forget  the  dinner 
hour. 

His  systematic  education  began  in  the 
school  of  Robert  Proud,  the  historian  of  Penn 
sylvania,  who  taught  him  Greek  and  Latin. 


FRANKLIN,  BROWN,  AND  IRVING     15 

But  having  shortly  ruined  his  health  by  over- 
study,  he  was  removed  from  school  and  encour 
aged  to  take  exercise  out  of  doors.  In  spite  of 
this  relaxed  program,  by  his  sixteenth  year  he 
had  made  versions  of  portions  of  the  book  of 
Job,  the  Psalms,  and  Ossian;  and  he  con 
templated  three  epic  poems — on  the  discov 
ery  of  America,  on  the  conquest  of  Peru,  and 
on  Cortez's  expedition  to  Mexico. 

When  his  health  permitted,  Brown  was 
apprenticed  to  a  Philadelphia  lawyer,  and 
began  to  read  law.  His  chief  interest,  how 
ever,  was  in  a  more  general  self -culture;  with 
several  other  youths  he  founded  a  debating 
society  and  joined  a  Belles  Lettres  Club,  and 
his  correspondence  shows  a  most  serious,  if 
extravagant,  intention  to  investigate  the 
whole  field  of  knowledge.  He  had  already 
begun  to  achieve  local  reputation  as  a  news 
paper  poet — though  his  fame  was  not  always 
happily  arrived  at.  In  August,  1789,  the 
Columbian  Magazine  printed  some  verses  of 
his  on  Franklin,  in  which  Philosophy  was 
made  to  congratulate  her  son  that  he  had 
cultivated  only  the  arts  of  peace;  the  type 
setter  by  an  error  substituted  the  name  of 
Washington  throughout.  But  none  of  these 
enterprises  were  soul-satisfying  to  a  youth  of 
Brown's  ambition,  and  the  one  thing  he  was 
not  studying  was  law;  it  was  therefore  natu- 


16       GREAT  AMERICAN  WRITERS 

ral  enough  that  he  should  have  decided 
boldly  upon  a  literary  career,  and  accordingly 
he  went  to  New  York,  where  he  thought  he 
might  find  a  larger  opportunity. 

For  a  while  his  life  in  New  York  was  but  a 
continuation  of  his  habits  in  Philadelphia; 
he  frequented  literary  clubs  and  wrote  desul 
tory  articles  for  the  newspapers.  But  his 
thoughts  were  busy  with  the  radical  ideas 
then  crossing  the  Atlantic — with  the  political 
doctrines,  for  example,  of  William  Godwin 
and  Mary  Wollstonecraft.  It  is  not  surpris 
ing,  therefore,  that  his  first  publication,  Al- 
cuin,  in  1797,  dealt  with  the  social  position  of 
woman,  and  advocated  a  very  advanced 
theory  of  divorce.  This  brief  work,  in  the 
form  of  a  rather  stilted  dialogue,  made  little 
impression.  But  in  1798,  when  his  novel 
Wieland,  or  the  Transformation,  appeared, 
Brown  immediately  found  himself  a  man  of 
note.  He  followed  up  the  success  with  great 
energy;  in  the  next  year  he  published  three 
more  stories,  Ormond,  or  the  Secret  Witness, 
Arthur  .Mervyn,  and  Edgar  Huntly.  He  is 
said  to  have  worked  at  this  time  on  five 
novels  at  once,  but  doubtless  much  of  this 
toil  consisted  in  revising  his  earlier  experi 
ments;  it  is  certain  that  at  least  one  early 
unpublished  novel,  called  Sky  Walk,  was  re 
incarnated  in  several  later  books. 


FRANKLIN,  BROWN,  AND  IRVING     17 

His  first  novel,  Wieland,  showed  the  influ 
ence  of  the  so-called  Gothic  school  of  romance 
then  fashionable  in  Europe,  but  it  showed 
also  that  he  was  content  with  none  of  the 
crude  or  mechanical  horrors  that  sometimes 
sufficed  for  that  school.  He  loved  mystery, 
but  for  him  it  must  be  the  mystery  of  science. 
That  his  notions  of  science  were  extremely 
elementary  does  not  greatly  matter;  he  was 
a  pioneer  in  the  study  of  psychological  terror, 
breaking  ground  equally  for  Poe  and  for  Haw 
thorne.  His  stories  seem  weak  when  ana 
lyzed,  but  they  produce  their  effect  upon  the 
reader  by  the  intellectual  seriousness  with 
which  even  jejune  plots  are  treated.  The 
plot  of  Wieland  is  the  history  of  an  abnormal 
family,  already  given  to  insanity,  who  are 
driven  to  destruction  by  mysterious  voices 
which  they  think  are  from  heaven.  The 
voices,  however,  are  produced  by  a  mischie 
vous  ventriloquist.  Extravagant  and  weak  as 
this  framework  is,  Brown  stretches  upon  it  a 
terrific  panorama  of  diseased  mental  states, 
and  suggests  in  the  conduct  of  the  ventrilo 
quist,  who  acts  without  a  motive,  some  of  the 
mystery  of  evil. 

Ormond,  a  less  interesting  book,  is  the  study 
of  the  malign  effect  of  selfishness.  The  hero 
is  a  religious  and  political  radical  who  falls 
in  love  with  Constantia  Dudley,  a  sort  of 


18        GREAT  AMERICAN  WRITERS 

modern  Griselda.  Constantia  withstands 
the  wicked  designs  of  her  lover  until  he 
murders  her  father  and  in  self-defense  she 
has  to  kill  him.  Her  character  has  preserved 
the  story  in  repute,  chiefly  because  Shelley, 
as  Peacock  tells  us,  particularly  admired  her, 
and  used  her  name  in  the  title  of  one  of  his 
poems,  To  Constantia  Singing. 

Arthur  Mervyn  is  a  far  more  important 
story.  It  owes  much  to  William  Godwin's 
Caleb  Williams  in  its  portraiture  of  a  benev 
olent  villain  and  his  victimized  servant,  but 
it  has  great  originality  of  its  own.  The  de 
scription  of  the  yellow  fever  epidemic  is  now 
its  best  remembered  episode;  at  the  time  it 
taught  other  writers,  such  as  Mrs.  Shelley, 
how  to  draw  such  realistic  horrors.  Brown's 
family  had  barely  escaped  the  pestilence  in 
Philadelphia,  in  1793;  five  years  later  he 
went  through  a  similar  epidemic  in  New 
York,  where  his  best  friend  lost  his  life  caring 
for  a  stricken  foreigner. 

Edgar  Huntly,  the  third  novel  of  this  pro 
lific  year,  1799,  is  interesting,  partly  as  a 
study  of  sleep-walking,  and  partly  as  one  of 
the  earliest  treatments  of  the  Indian  in  Ameri 
can  fiction.  The  story  frankly  breaks  into  two 
parts.  The  first  half  deals  with  the  murder 
committed  by  a  sleep-walker  and  the  at 
tempt  of  Edgar  Huntly  to  trace  the  crime. 


FRANKLIN,   BROWN,  AND  IRVING    19 

The  second  part  describes  the  pursuit  of 
Huntly  by  the  Indians,  and  his  rescue  of  a 
beautiful  girl,  their  captive.  Brown  knew 
the  Indians  only  from  the  point  of  view  of  the 
towns;  that  is,  he  thought  of  them  as  de 
graded,  rum-drinking  ruffians,  with  a  few 
shreds  and  patches  of  lingering  pride.  His 
Indians  are  not  entirely  unlike  the  fallen 
Chingachgook  in  The  Pioneers.  But  even 
without  the  romance  that  Cooper  found  in 
the  red  men,  Brown's  Indians  have  the  inter 
est  of  novelty,  of  figures  unfamiliar  in  litera 
ture — so  unfamiliar,  indeed,  that  Brown  him 
self  does  not  seem  quite  at  home  with  them. 
These  books  brought  him  reputation  in 
America  and  England.  They  did  not,  how 
ever,  add  very  much  to  his  income.  Their 
immediate  effect  in  New  York  was  to  give 
him  enough  prestige  to  float  an  unlucky  mag 
azine,  which  survived  only  a  year  and  a 
half.  In  1801  he  returned  to  Philadelphia 
and  spent  the  rest  of  his  short  life  industri 
ously  laboring  on  magazines,  with  excursions 
into  political  pamphleteering  as  a  sort  of  re 
lief  from  his  hackwork.  In  1801  he  published 
Clara  Howard,  a  rather  weak  story,  notable 
now  because  it  portrays  a  concrete  sort  of 
modern  woman,  as  the  dialogue  Alcuin  had 
displayed  the  theoretical  type.  In  1804  he 
married  Miss  Elizabeth  Linn,  whose  acquaint- 


20       GREAT  AMERICAN  WRITERS 

ance  he  had  made  in  New  York,  and  in  the 
same  year  he  published  in  England  Jane 
Talbot,  his  last  novel.  It  is  in  a  quieter 
manner  than  his  early  stories  of  horror;  it 
also  indicates  a  decline  of  radicalism,  for  the 
influence  of  Godwin  upon  the  hero  is  spoken 
of  as  malign.  Two  years  later  the  indefati 
gable  worker  became  editor  of  the  newly 
founded  American  Register,  a  successful 
chronicle  of  events  in  America  and  Europe. 
He  was  interested  in  many  other  projects, 
and  an  English  reviewer  after  his  death  drew 
attention  to  his  indomitable  energy.  But  he 
was  already  a  victim  of  consumption,  and 
he  had  little  leisure  to  fight  the  disease.  In 
1809  he  was  persuaded  to  spend  a  vacation 
in  New  York  and  New  Jersey.  In  the 
autumn  his  strength  rapidly  failed,  and  he 
died  February  22,  1810,  shortly  after  the 
appearance  of  the  first  important  book  of 
the  earliest  American  author  who  is  still  read 
to  a  considerable  extent,  and  with  adequate 
esthetic  pleasure,  Washington  Irving. 

Irving's  career  was  both  fortunate  and  at 
tractive.  He  was  born  on  April  3,  1783,  in 
the  city  of  New  York,  which  for  a  short 
period  succeeded  Philadelphia  and  preceded 
Boston  as  the  literary  centre  of  the  young 
country.  He  was  of  Scotch  and  English 
descent  and  was  brought  up  in  old-world  ways 


FRANKLIN,  BROWN,  AND  IRVING    21 

amid  new- world  surroundings — facts  which 
partly  account  for  the  charge  often  made 
against  his  writings,  that  they  are  British  in 
their  warp  and  woof.  He  was  sickly  in  child 
hood  and  youth,  and  he  received  little  formal 
instruction,  but  he  showed  an  early  literary 
capacity,  and  a  journey  to  Europe,  undertaken 
for  the  sake  of  his  health  in  1804,  both  broad 
ened  his  field  of  observation  and  stimulated 
his  interest  in  foreign  culture.  On  his  return 
he  had  a  share  in  an  Addisonian  miscellany, 
Salmagundi9  which  to  American  readers  of 
1806  seemed  an  achievement  of  some  im 
portance.  Then,  after  the  death  of  his 
fiancee  had  given  him  a  background  of  tender 
sentiment, — he  never  married, — he  produced 
his  elaborate  burlesque  History  of  New  York, 
the  reputed  author  of  which,  Diedrich  Knick 
erbocker,  still  enjoys,  even  after  the  lapse  of 
a  century,  a  somewhat  green  old  age.  The 
book  is  scarcely  a  masterpiece  of  humor  which 
readers  of  any  nationality  whatsoever  will 
appreciate,  but  it  is  well  sustained,  thoroughly 
genial,  and  worthy  of  the  reputation  it  has 
never  lost.  That  its  author's  genius  was  not 
of  the  kind  that  is  known  as  robust  seems 
clear  from  the  fact  that  his  next  work  of  any 
consequence  was  not  published  until  a  decade 
later,  when  Irving  had  been  for  some  little 
time  a  resident  of  England,  the  partner  of  his 


22       GREAT  AMERICAN  WRITERS 

brothers    in    a    commercial    enterprise    that 
failed. 

The  Sketch-Book,  which  was  first  published 
in  America,  in  parts,  in  1819,  remains,  prob 
ably,  the  chief  basis  of  the  international  fame 
which  Irving  began  to  win  on  its  appearance. 
Rip  Van  Winkle  and  The  Legend  of  Sleepy  Hol 
low  made  the  beautiful  Catskills  and  the  valley 
of  the  Hudson  not  only  the  home  of  romance, 
but  for  Americans,  in  a  sense,  classic  ground. 
With  The  Spectre  Bridegroom  they  justify  the 
claim  that  Irving  was  the  father  of  the 
modern  short  story,  perhaps  the  single 
literary  form  in  which  America  may  claim 
pre-eminence.  Much  of  the  sentiment  of  the 
book  has  lost  its  flavor,  and  the  eighteenth- 
century  style  appears  to  some  readers  to  be 
sluggish  and  belated,  to  be  as  old-fashioned,  in 
short,  as  "Geoffrey  Crayon"  himself, the  com 
piler  of  the  miscellany.  Some  of  the  themes 
have  long  ceased  to  interest,  but  the  felicity 
and  charm  of  the  book,  considered  as  a  whole, 
and  the  versatility  of  the  author  ought  to  be 
as  apparent  to  the  latter-day  reader  as  to 
Irving's  contemporaries.  It  ought  to  be 
clear  also  that  Irving  was  not  merely  a  ser 
vile  imitator  of  Goldsmith  and  other  British 
writers,  but  an  original  kindly  humorist  and 
a  sympathetic  interpreter  of  England  to  Eng 
lishmen.  Bmcebridge  Hall  continued  this 


FRANKLIN,  BROWN,  AND  IRVING     23 

work  of  interpretation,  and,  like  The  Sketch- 
Book,  has  not  outlived  its  reputation,  but  it 
may  be  doubted  whether,  as  a  whole,  the 
Tales  of  a  Traveller  were  worthy  of  their  au 
thor.  The  father  of  the  short  story  was  not 
an  unfailing  master  of  the  form,  and  was 
primarily  an  essayist  rather  than  a  writer  of 
fiction. 

Meanwhile  the  well-paid  and  courted  au 
thor  had  left  England  for  the  Continent  and 
had  fallen  in  love  with  Spain,  the  romance  of 
which  supplied  for  some  years  his  not  over- 
creative  imagination  with  materials  on  which 
to  work.  His  Life  of  Columbus  appeared  in 
1828,  The  Conquest  of  Granada  in  1829,  and 
the  Spanish  medley  or  sketch-book  known  as 
The  Alhambra  in  1832.  All  were  of  genuine 
though  somewhat  facile  merit  and  were  of 
special  service  to  Americans  in  stimulating 
their  interest  in  that  old  world  from  the 
culture  of  which  they  had  so  much  to  learn. 
In  estimating  Irving's  place  in  American  lit 
erature,  as  in  estimating  that  of  Longfellow, 
this  service  as  a  transmitter  of  culture  should 
always  be  borne  in  mind.  To  judge  them 
merely  from  the  amount  of  originality  to  be 
discovered  in  their  works  is  to  do  them  an 
injustice.  It  should  be  remembered  also 
that  Irving,  although  not  a  great  historical 
scholar,  was  nevertheless  a  conscientious  his- 


24       GREAT  AMERICAN  WRITERS 

torian  who  was  furthermore  a  delightful  and 
practised  writer,  and  that  he  may  thus  be 
fairly  placed  at  the  head,  in  point  of  time,  of 
that  group  of  eminent  historians  which  con 
stitutes  one  of  the  chief  glories  of  American 
literature.  Given  his  tastes  and  the  youthful- 
ness  of  America,  it  would  have  been  surprising 
if,  like  Bancroft,  he  had  undertaken  a  magnil 
oquent  history  of  his  native  republic;  but 
years  of  absence  had  not  diminished  his 
patriotism,  the  history  of  Spain  was  connected 
with  that  of  America,  and  in  his  old  age  Irving 
became  the  worthy  biographer  of  Washington. 
He  was  one  of  the  first  of  the  distinguished 
American  men  of  letters  who  have  served  their 
country  in  diplomatic  positions.  In  1829  he 
was  appointed  secretary  of  legation  at  Lon 
don;  then,  after  several  years  spent  in  Amer 
ica,  during  which  he  saw  something  of  the 
far  West  and  gathered  materials  for  three 
new  books,  he  was  appointed  in  1842  min 
ister  to  Spain.  He  filled  the  post  acceptably 
for  nearly  four  years,  after  which  he  returned 
to  settle  down  for  the  remainder  of  his  life  at 
his  estate  in  the  valley  of  the  Hudson,  known 
as  Sunnyside.  There  he  supervised  an  edi 
tion  of  his  works,  wrote  his  lives  of  Mahomet 
and  Goldsmith, — the  latter,  one  of  his 
best  performances, — and  labored  over  his 
biography  of  Washington  in  five  volumes. 


FRANKLIN,   BROWN,  AND  IRVING    25 

Despite  its  many  shortcomings,  some  of  them 
due  to  Irving's  own  qualities,  most  of  them 
to  the  contemporary  condition  of  historical 
scholarship,  this  biography  has  not  been 
supplanted  by  any  account  of  its  great  sub 
ject  carried  out  on  an  equal  scale.  It  was 
an  achievement  worthy  to  mark  the  close 
of  the  life  of  the  first  notable  American 
man  of  letters  able  to  attain  the  rank  of  a 
classic. 

That  life  covered  very  nearly  the  entire 
period  between  the  Revolution  and  the  Civil 
War.  As  we  have  seen,  Irving  was  born  in 
1783,  two  years  after  Yorktown;  he  died  on 
November  28,  1859,  not  two  years  before  the 
attack  on  Fort  Sumter.  When  he  began  to 
write,  America  had  produced  distinguished 
statesmen  and  soldiers  and  divines  and  scien 
tists,  but  not  a  single  truly  important  writer 
in  the  domain  of  pure  literature.  When  he 
laid  down  his  pen,  Cooper  and  Poe  had  fin 
ished  their  careers,  Bryant  was  already  a 
venerable  figure,  Hawthorne  had  but  a  few 
years  to  live,  Emerson  and  Longfellow,  with 
more  than  two  decades  before  them,  had 
probably  done  their  best  work,  Lowell, 
Holmes,  and  Whittier  were  already  widely 
known,  Mrs.  Stowe  was  famous,  Walt  Whit 
man's  Leaves  of  Grass  had  begun  to  divide 
readers  into  hostile  camps,  and  Thoreau,  al- 


26        GREAT  AMERICAN  WRITERS 

though  still  more  or  less  obscure,  was  the 
great  writer  we  now  admire.  The  so-called 
Knickerbocker  and  Transcendentalist  periods 
of  American  literature  had  been  passed 
through,  the  scanty  literature  of  the  Old 
South  was  almost  complete,  there  were  signs 
that  there  would  soon  be  a  literature  of  the 
New  West.  Amid  this  rapid  evolution,  lit 
erary,  social,  political,  Irving  preserved  the 
poise  of  English  tradition  and  culture,  but 
he  combined  with  it  a  certain  largeness  of 
sympathies,  naivete  of  sentiment,  and  geni 
ality  of  humor  that  prevented  his  country 
men  from  regarding  him  as  an  alien.  Latter- 
day  Americans  often  affect  to  consider  him  as 
practically  a  component  part  of  British  liter 
ature,  but  their  own  literature  has  too  few 
urbane  writers  to  be  able  to  afford  to  lose 
Irving.  Even  if  he  had  written  nothing  but 
Rip  Van  Winkle,  he  would  have  had  to  his 
credit  one  of  the  few  contributions  to  the 
literature  of  the  entire  western  world  that 
any  American  has  made.  But  he  did  much 
more  than  this.  He  was  the  first  to  give 
American  literature  a  good  and  permanent 
standing  abroad;  he  was  influential  in  intro 
ducing  European  culture  to  Americans;  he 
was  a  successful  pioneer  in  the  short  story,  in 
history,  and  in  biography;  and  he  left  a  body 
of  writings  a  considerable  portion  of  which, 


WILLIAM  CULLEN   BRYANT         27 

after  the  lapse  of  some  two  generations,  still 
possesses  vitality. 

CHAPTER  II 

WILLIAM   CULLEN   BRYANT 

IF  we  were  to  follow  strictly  the  dates  of  birth 
of  the  chief  American  authors,  the  name  of 
Cooper,  who  was  born  in  1789,  would  come 
immediately  after  that  of  Irving.  The  poet 
who  is  the  subject  of  this  chapter,  the  so- 
called  Father  of  American  Poetry,  was  several 
years  younger  than  the  creator  of  Leather- 
Stocking,  and  yet  was  the  latter 's  senior  in  such 
literary  fame  as  the  young  republic  had  to  give. 
In  treating  Bryant,  therefore,  after  Irving  and 
before  Cooper,  we  do  no  violence  to  literary 
history,  and  we  give  poetry  that  precedence 
over  fiction  which  it  held  in  the  eyes  of  con 
temporaries  of  the  two  men. 

For,  strange  as  it  may  seem  to  us,  our  an 
cestors  of  the  first  quarter  of  the  nineteenth 
century  thought  a  good  deal  of  their  poetry, 
and  it  had  even  begun  to  attract  attention  in 
Great  Britain.  To-day  the  names  represented 
in  early  anthologies  are  either  absolutely  un 
known,  or  are  connected  with  one  or  two 
poems  of  slight  esthetic  value  and  mild  pa 
triotic  interest.  Philip  Freneau,  Timothy 


28       GREAT  AMERICAN  WRITERS 

Dwight,  the  Boanergic  President  of  Yale  Col 
lege,  whose  epic,  The  Conquest  of  Canaan,  was 
favorably  reviewed  by  Cowper,  Joseph  Hop- 
kinson,  author  of  Hail  Columbia,  Frances 
Scott  Key,  author  of  The  Star-Spangled 
Banner,  Washington  Allston,  the  painter-poet 
and  the  friend  of  Coleridge,  Samuel  Wood- 
worth,  the  author  of  The  Bucket,  one  of  those 
sentimental  effusions  in  verse  dear  to  the 
heart  of  the  public  and  vexatious  to  the  soul 
of  the  conscientious  anthologist,  Richard 
Henry  Dana,  Sr.,  and  James  Abraham  Hill- 
house, — high-hung  portraits  in  our  national 
gallery  of  poets, — Richard  Henry  Wilde,  who 
once  or  twice  struck  a  true  lyric  note — all 
these  sons  of  Apollo  had  looked  upon  their 
father's  face  before  the  rays  of  that  divinity 
fell  upon  Bryant's  cradle  in  the  little  town  of 
Cummington,  Massachusetts,  November  3, 
1794. 

The  thought  of  the  sun  shining  upon  Bry 
ant's  cradle  suggests  the  lines 

"There    is   Bryant,   as   quiet,   as   cool,   and    as 

dignified, 

As  a  smooth,  silent  iceberg,  that  never  is  ignified, 
Save  when  by  reflection  'tis  kindled  o'  nights 
With  a  semblance  of  flame  by  the  chill  North 
ern  Lights," 

which  some  half  a  century  later,  in  A  Fable  for 
Critics,  the  irreverent  Lowell  applied  to  the 


WILLIAM  CULLEN  BRYANT         29 

first  "bard"  of  the  nation.  Dignity  and 
worth  are  terms  one  naturally  associates  with 
Bryant  both  as  man  and  as  poet;  genial 
warmth  is  what  one  scarcely  thinks  of  predi 
cating,  either  of  his  character  or  of  his  writ 
ings.  As  much  the  same  thing  may  be  said 
with  justice  of  Milton  and  Wordsworth,  and 
as  Bryant,  in  his  way,  was  an  individual  mas 
ter  of  blank  verse  and  a  true  interpreter  of 
nature,  we  may  conclude  that  our  first  dis 
tinguished  poet  keeps  good  company,  even  if 
we  ourselves,  like  Lowell,  find  his  companion 
ship  a  trifle  frigid. 

"If  he  stirs  you  at  all,  it  is  just,  on  my  soul, 
Like  being  stirred  up  with  the  very  North  Pole." 

Doubtless  many  good  Americans  of  1848 
had  never  felt  in  reading  Bryant  the  frigidity 
of  which  the  younger  poet,  the  disciple  of 
Keats  rather  than  of  Wordsworth,  smilingly 
complained.  Probably  not  a  few  exemplary 
Americans  of  the  present  day  fail  to  feel  this 
frigidity  and  do  feel  uncomfortably  warm 
with  Byron  and  Alfred  de  Musset.  These  are 
matters  of  temperament  and  training  which 
ought  to  be  considered  by  the  student  of  the 
manifestations  of  taste  in  a  modern  democ 
racy.  Here  we  may  content  ourselves  with 
affirming  that  those  patriotic  Americans  who 
resent  a  detached  treatment  of  Bryant  and  of 


30          GREAT  AMERICAN  WRITERS 

the  other  elder  gods  of  our  literary  heaven 
may  cherish  the  proud  consciousness  that  not 
one  of  them  could,  or  would,  have  written 
"Don  Juan."  It  is  time,  however,  to  return 
to  the  cradle  of  Bryant. 

The  boy  was  the  son  of  a  physician,  and 
was  named  after  the  famous  Scotch  professor 
of  medicine,  but  he  was  brought  up,  as  befits 
a  poet,  in  contact  with  hills  and  woods  and 
unsophisticated  people,  and  also  with  good 
books,  including  Wordsworth's  Lyrical  Bal 
lads.  His  precocious  attempts  in  verse  were 
perhaps  over-f avorably  received  by  his  father, 
who  actually  published  at  Boston  in  1808  his 
son's  satire  on  Jefferson's  peace-policy.  It 
speaks  well  for  no  one  that  the  volume  should 
have  reached  a  second  edition  the  next  year. 
In  1810  the  youthful  author  of  The  Embargo 
went  to  college  for  a  short  period,  and  then  he 
began  to  study  law,  his  heart  all  the  while 
being  set  on  literature.  Thanatopsis  was 
written  in  his  seventeenth  year,  although  the 
passage  that  makes  one  remember  it,  the 
solemn  and  sonorous  close,  was  not  composed 
until  about  ten  years  later.  It  was  a  striking 
poem  for  a  youth,  original  despite  its  indebt 
edness  to  Blair's  Grave,  to  Cowper,  and  to 
Wordsworth.  Dr.  Bryant  was  entirely  justi 
fied  in  sending  it  to  the  new  Boston  periodical, 
The  North  American  Review,  where  it  appeared 


WILLIAM  CULLEN  BRYANT         31 

in  September,  1817.  A  few  months  later  the 
same  magazine  published  the  stanzas  To  a 
Waterfowl,  and  discriminating  readers  were 
warranted  in  believing  that  a  poet  of  true 
distinction  had  begun  his  career  in  the  new 
world. 

This  poet  was  soon  invited  to  deliver  the 
Phi  Beta  Kappa  poem  at  Harvard,  where  he 
dealt  with  The  Ages  in  a  becoming  fashion. 
One  prefers  the  Wordsworthian  treatment  of 
The  Yellow  Violet.  Both  poems  appeared, 
with  others,  in  a  volume  published  in  1821, 
the  year  of  Cooper's  Spy.  The  novel  was  not 
innocent  of  indebtedness  to  Scott,  the  poetry, 
to  half  a  dozen  or  more  British  bards;  but 
both  novelist  and  poet  were  none  the  less  true 
Americans  with  eyes  fixed  on  American  nature 
and  on  American  men  and  women.  "A  stately 
moralist  in  verse"  is  a  formula  which  does 
not  altogether  suffice  to  describe  Bryant,  but 
does  not  fall  far  short  of  adequacy.  He  could 
be  idyllic,  patriotic,  sentimental,  even  roman 
tic  in  this  or  that  occasional  poem,  but  in  the 
main  he  was  from  youth  to  age  a  moralizer  in 
blank  verse — both  morals  and  verse  being  al 
ways  sure  to  gain  one's  respect  and  sometimes 
worthy  to  hold  one's  admiration. 

In  1825  Bryant  removed  to  New  York, 
lured  by  the  establishment  of  a  magazine 
which  speedily  failed.  Soon  afterwards  he 


32        GREAT  AMERICAN  WRITERS 

began  his  more  than  half  a  century's  connec 
tion  with  the  Evening  Post,  which  became 
under  him  the  dignified  and  important  news 
paper  it  has  continued  to  be  to  our  own  day. 
So  absorbed  was  he  by  his  duties  as  editor  and 
as  leading  citizen,  that  for  twenty  years  or 
more  his  spring  of  genius,  never  very  copious, 
almost  went  dry.  Still  he  did  not  cease  to 
write  verse,  and  sometimes,  as  in  the  famous 
lines  in  The  Battlefield,  beginning  "Truth 
crushed  to  earth,"  he  wrote  to  excellent  pur 
pose.  In  1832  a  volume  with  an  introduction 
by  Irving  made  him  known  to  English  readers, 
and  he  more  than  maintained  his  hold  upon 
his  own  countrymen  [by  pointing  out  to  them 
the  spacious  and  grand  qualities  of  American 
scenery  and  by  inciting  them  to  a  noble  na 
tional  life.  As  he  grew  older,  he  became  less 
active  as  an  editor,  but  as  a  sage  and  bard 
and  as  a  memorial  orator  he  excited  a  remark 
ably  widespread  and  real  influence.  He  was 
a  figure  to  be  venerated,  though  scarcely  to 
be  idolized,  and  in  one  particular  he  proved 
himself  to  be  exceptional  among  poets.  Much 
of  his  later  work  in  verse  shows  absolutely 
no  falling  off  when  compared  with  the  best 
of  his  youth  and  of  his  prime.  The  Flood 
of  Years  may  contain  no  passage  equal  to  the 
close  of  Thanatopsis,  but  it  proves  that  its 
author  had  kept  throughout  his  long  life  the 


WILLIAM  CULLEN  BRYANT         33 

ideals,  not  merely  of  a  stoic  moralist,  but  of 
a  high-minded  poet.  It  was  altogether  in 
keeping  with  his  career  and  his  character  that 
he  should  have  completed  in  his  old  age  a 
meritorious  blank- verse  translation  of  Homer 
undertaken  as  a  solace  against  the  grief 
caused  by  the  death  of  his  wife.  He  him 
self  died  on  June  12,  1878,  from  the  effects 
of  an  accident  that  occurred  immediately 
after  he  had  delivered  an  address  at  the  un 
veiling  of  a  statue  of  Mazzini.  The  Repub 
lic  had  but  just  celebrated  its  centenary.  In 
the  hundred  years  of  its  existence  it  had  pro 
duced  greater  poets  than  Bryant  and  many 
far  greater  writers  of  prose,  but  among  its 
men  of  letters  there  had  been  no  more  exem 
plary  and  impressive  personality.  Nearly 
half  a  century  later  this  is  still  true.  His  art 
is  that  of  the  elder  poets  and  seems  old- 
fashioned  and  lacking  in  color  and  delicacy; 
but  it  has  elements  of  largeness  and  a  validity 
of  appeal  that  may  well  be  envied  by  his  suc 
cessors.  Fashions  in  poetry  will  come  and  go, 
while  men  continue  to  memorize  and  repeat 
the  close  of  Thanatopsis: — 

"So  live,  that  when  thy  summons  comes  to  join 
The  innumerable  caravan,  which  moves 
To   that   mysterious   realm,   where  each   shall 

take 
His  chamber  in  the  silent  halls  of  death, 


34       GREAT  AMERICAN  WRITERS 

Thou  go  not,  like  the  quarry-slave  at  night, 
Scourged   to  his   dungeon,  but,  sustained   and 

soothed 

By  an  unfaltering  trust,  approach  thy  grave 
Like  one  who  wraps  the  drapery  of  his  couch 
About  him,  and  lies  down  to  pleasant  dreams." 

And  with  this  sonorous  passage  they  will 
probably  remember  the  last  stanza  of  the 
apostrophe  To  a  Waterfowl: — 

"He,  who  from  zone  to  zone 

Guides  through  the  boundless  sky  thy  cer 
tain  flight, 

In  the  long  way  that  I  must  tread  alone 
Will  lead  my  steps  aright." 

This  is  not  the  poetry  of  sophistication;  it 
is  rather  the  poetry  of  a  simple  age  and  people 
not  yet  intoxicated  with  their  own  material 
power  and  cut  off  by  an  ocean  from  the  com 
plex  emotional  and  intellectual  life  of  the  old 
world.  In  a  sense,  Bryant  was  much  less  of 
an  Augustan  than  Holmes,  who  was  born 
fifteen  years  after  him;  but,  while  in  some  re 
spects  influenced  by  the  romantic  movement, 
he  was  on  the  whole  neither  the  child  of  his 
own  age  nor  the  belated  representative  of  a 
by-gone  generation.  He  was  a  rather  aloof 
and  eclectic  spirit  who  with  no  very  great 
increase  of  natural  endowments  might  have 
ranked  as  a  reflective  poet  almost  as  high  as 
Wordsworth  himself.  As  it  is,  his  stanzas 


WILLIAM  CULLEN  BRYANT         35 

beginning  "O  fairest  of  the  rural  maids" 
yield  to  "Three  years  she  grew,"  and  A 
Forest  Hymn  cannot  vie  with  the  great  poem 
which  we  call  for  convenience  Tintern  Abbey. 
But  the  hearts  of  his  countrymen  throbbed 
in  unison  with  his  when  he  apostrophized 
America  as  the  "mother  of  a  mighty  race," 
and  many  a  quiet  lover  of  poetry  to-day  reads 
and  re-reads  with  pensive  pleasure  the  five 
stanzas  To  the  Fringed  Gentian. 

Although  a  New  Englander  by  birth, 
training,  and  temperament,  Bryant,  from  his 
long  residence  in  New  York,  is  treated  as  the 
head  of  the  so-called  Knickerbocker  group  of 
writers.  Most  members  of  the  group,  for 
example,  James  Kirk  Paulding,  a  connection 
of  Irving's  by  marriage,  are  almost  forgotten. 
A  few  poems  by  Fitz-Greene  Halleck  (1790- 
1867)  are  still  remembered,  particularly  the 
short  sincere  elegy  beginning 

"Green  be  the  turf  above  thee, 

Friend  of  my  better  days! 
None  knew  thee  but  to  love  thee, 
Nor  named  thee  but  to  praise."  4 

This  elegy  was  composed  in  memory  of 
Joseph  Rodman  Drake  (1795-1820),  a  young 
physician,  whose  poems  were  collected  some 
fifteen  years  after  his  premature  death.  The 
most  important  of  these  productions,  The 


36       GREAT  AMERICAN  WRITERS 

Culprit  Fay,  was  a  more  than  creditable 
"poem  of  the  fancy,"  as  Wordsworth  would 
have  labelled  it,  for  so  young  a  poet  in  a 
country  and  an  age  that  had  done  so  little  in 
creative  literature;  but  it  hardly  deserved 
the  favor  it  won  from  a  generation  for  which 
Poe  had  already  published  "  Helen,  thy 
beauty  is  to  me,"  and  it  certainly  does  not 
warrant  any  one  in  connecting  the  name  of  its 
author  with  that  of  Keats. 

A  glance  at  the  poetry  of  the  entire  country 
prior  to  the  first  genuine  successes  of  Long 
fellow  and  Poe  shows  how  completely  Bryant 
dominated  the  generation  of  which  Irving  and 
Cooper  were  the  chief  prose  writers.  Some  of 
his  rivals  have  already  been  mentioned; 
others  may  be  recalled  only  to  be  dismissed 
with  a  few  words  of  comment,  which  cannot 
at  best  be  even  mildly  eulogistic.  The  truth 
is  that  it  was  a  very  uncritical  and  a  bump 
tiously  patriotic  generation,  which  insisted 
on  converting  an  outrageously  large  number 
of  geese  into  swans.  Every  generation  will 
do  this  to  a  certain  extent,  and  every  democ 
racy  will  allow  itself  special  latitude  in  the 
matter;  but  no  generation,  in  any  form  of 
society,  ought,  for  the  sake  of  its  reputation, 
to  be  quite  so  flagrantly  blear-eyed  in  its 
selection  of  poetic  swans  as  the  generation 
which  stretched  from  the  War  of  1812  to  that 


WILLIAM  CULLEN  BRYANT         37 

with  Mexico  showed  itself  to  be.  Think  of 
Mrs.  Maria  Go  wen  Brooks  and  her  romantic 
poem  Zophiel,  or  the  Bride  of  Seven!  It  is  a 
comfort,  however,  to  recall  the  fact  that  it 
was  the  Poet  Laureate  of  the  mother  country, 
no  less  a  person  than  Robert  Southey  himself, 
who  gave  her  the  name  of  "Maria  del  Occi- 
dente,"  and  declared  her  to  be  "the  most 
imaginative  and  impassioned  of  all  poetesses." 
Even  Southey  would  have  hesitated  thus  to 
characterize  Mrs.  Lydia  Huntley  Sigourney, 
whose  popularity  was  in  direct  proportion 
with  the  fluidity  and  the  sentimentality  of 
her  exemplary  muse.  Almost  equally  facile 
was  the  poetry  of  the  versatile  James  Gates 
Percival,  perhaps  the  most  self-conscious  of 
our  early  poets,  unless  that  honor  be  reserved 
for  John  Neal.  But  the  reading  of  these  works 
is  a  task  to  which  even  the  most  callous  of  lit 
erary  historians  resigns  himself  with  a  groan. 
Such  a  student  feels  inclined  to  bless  the  lazy 
slave-holding  South  for  its  unproductiveness, 
and  also  for  the  fact  that  among  its  few 
would-be  poets  are  to  be  found  one  or  two 
amateurs  in  whom  some  lyric  quality  is  to 
be  discovered.  One  of  these  amateurs  is  a 
Marylander,  Edward  Coate  Pinkney,  who 
died  in  early  manhood,  before  he  had  had 
time  to  write  an  epic.  Among  his  lyrics 
there  are  snatches  of  real  song  almost  un- 


38        GREAT  AMERICAN  WRITERS 

matcliable  in  the  more  pretentious  work  of 
his  contemporaries. 

CHAPTER  III 

JAMES  FENIMORE   COOPER 

THE  psychological,  introspective  turn  which, 
as  we  have  seen,  Charles  Brockden  Brown  gave 
to  the  early  American  novel,  was  lost  for  a 
while  in  the  development  it  received  at  the 
hands  of  James  Fenimore  Cooper.  All  of 
Brown  that  could  survive  in  that  virile  unre 
flecting  genius  was  the  interest  in  the  Indian, 
and  the  truthful  portrait  of  the  American 
landscape.  But  even  for  these  Cooper  went, 
not  to  Brown,  but  to  his  own  experience. 
With  Brown  he  is  linked  only  by  the  common 
patriotic  desire  to  celebrate  their  country  in 
literature.  His  boyhood  and  his  active  life 
supplied  him  with  all  his  materials,  so  that 
in  his  best  work  he  owes  practically  nothing 
to  any  foreign  inspiration. 

Cooper  was  born  at  Burlington,  New  Jer 
sey,  September  15,  1789.  His  father,  Judge 
William  Cooper,  was  of  a  Quaker  family;  his 
mother,  Elizabeth  Fenimore,  was  of  Swedish 
descent.  He  was  the  eleventh  of  their  twelve 
children.  The  Judge  had  bought  a  large 
estate  m  New  York,  on  Otsego  Lake,  and 


JAMES  FENIMORE  COOPER         39 

there  he  removed  in  1790,  and  devoted  him 
self  to  colonizing  the  country.  What  his 
occupation  was,  and  incidentally  his  aggres 
sive  personality  and  his  innate  literary  gift, 
are  all  amply  disclosed  in  a  series  of  letters 
he  wrote,  and  had  published  in  Dublin,  to 
encourage  emigration  to  his  lands.  Perhaps 
only  a  hardy  soul  would  care  to  attempt 
the  rough  life  he  describes.  In  his  settle 
ment  the  less  reputable  element  of  society, 
or  at  least  the  unconventional  element,  set 
the  tone;,]  in  spite  of  his  effort  to  rule  with 
old-world  decorum,  it  was  at  best  a  frontier 
town.  The  faithful  portrait  of  it,  even  of 
the  Judge's  house,  is  in  The  Pioneers. 

Here  Cooper  spent  his  boyhood,  until  his 
father  sent  him  to  study  under  the  rector  of 
St.  Peter's  Church,  Albany.  After  a  brief 
preparation  he  entered  the  class  of  1806,  in 
Yale  College,  when  he  was  only  thirteen  years 
old.  Whether  he  had  been  precocious  in 
his  studies  cannot  now  be  discovered,  for  the 
college  soon  dismissed  him  for  doing  no 
studying  at  all,  and  after  some  delay  he 
shipped  for  a  year's  voyage  on  the  Sterling, 
a  merchant  vessel  bound  for  England  and 
Spain.  On  his  return  he  entered  the  navy 
and  received  his  commission  as  Midshipman 
January  1,  1808.  In  his  first  year  of  service 
he  helped  build  a  brig  of  sixteen  guns  on 


40       GREAT  AMERICAN  WRITERS 

Lake  Ontario;  in  1809  he  had  command,  for 
a  short  time,  of  the  gunboats  on  Lake  Cham- 
plain;  in  1810  he  served  on  the  Wasp  under 
Lawrence,  the  future  hero  of  the  Chesapeake. 
But  his  naval  career  ended  abruptly  when,  on 
January  1,  1811,  he  married  Miss  De  Lancey, 
of  Mamaroneck,  Westchester  County,  New 
York.  After  living  for  a  while  with  his 
father-in-law,  and  for  a  while  in  a  rented 
house  near  by,  Cooper  returned  to  his  father's 
estate;  but  as  his  wife  was  discontented  with 
the  frontier,  he  finally  in  1817  settled  in 
Scarsdale,  Westchester. 

Desultory  as  Cooper's  life  had  been  up  to 
this  time,  his  changes  of  location  had  edu 
cated  him  in  almost  all  the  scenes  of  his 
greatest  stories;  he  was  familiar  with  the 
frontier,  with  the  sea,  with  the  great  inland 
lakes,  with  the  New  York  and  New  England 
forests.  His  Westchester  residence  was  to 
give  him  a  setting  for  his  first  great  book.  In 
1820  a  very  poor  English  novel  which  he  was 
trying  to  read,  inspired  in  him  a  confidence 
that  he  could  write  as  good  a  book  himself. 
It  has  never  been  determined  whether  Pre 
caution,  the  result  of  this  confidence,  was  as 
good  as  the  English  book,  but  in  this  'pren 
tice  writing  he  discovered  his  ambition.  In 
December,  1821,  he  published  The  Spy,  in 
New  York,  and  its  immediate  success  urged 


JAMES  FENIMORE  COOPER         41 

him  on  to  write  The  Pioneers,  which  in  1823 
made  a  similar  success.  The  Pilot  followed 
in  1824,  with  no  failing  of  power;  then  in 
1825  Cooper  tried  to  write  an  historical  pic 
ture  of  Boston  in  the  Revolution.  As  he 
knew  little  of  the  scene  of  his  story,  Lionel 
Lincoln  was  sadly  lacking  in  the  magic  of  the 
other  books.  In  1826  he  returned  to  his 
true  field  in  The  Last  of  the  Mohicans,  by 
many  readers  considered  his  masterpiece. 
After  this  astonishing  output  within  five 
years,  he  went  abroad  for  rest  and  study, 
and  did  not  return  until  November,  1833. 

His  literary  work  in  these  first  years  was 
his  best,  if  we  may  arbitrarily  include  with  it 
The  Prairie,  1827,  written  abroad,  and  The 
Pathfinder,  1841,  written  after  his  return. 
This  inclusion  of  later  with  earlier  work  is, 
however,  not  so  very  arbitrary,  after  all,  if  we 
remember  that  in  the  early  period  Cooper 
invented  Leatherstocking,  and  plotted  out 
his  life;  the  three  additional  stories  in  the 
series  were  simply  delayed  in  execution.  In 
imagination  and  in  temper  they  are  like 
nothing  else  that  Cooper  wrote  after  sailing 
for  Europe  in  June,  1826.  It  is  perhaps  well, 
therefore,  to  think  of  this  early  work  by  itself. 

Most  of  his  quality  as  a  story-teller  is 
represented  in  The  Spy,  although  his  char 
acteristic  scene  is  not  in  that  book.  He 


42        GREAT  AMERICAN  WRITERS 

conceived  of  a  plot  as  a  conflict — not  pri 
marily  a  conflict  of  ideas  or  of  civilization, 
though  some  such  spiritual  crisis  often  stands 
behind  his  story  and  ennobles  it,  but  an  ele 
mental  conflict  of  strong  men  fighting  for  life. 
He  had  a  singular  gift  for  developing  in 
stories  of  civilization,  situations  that  are 
motived  by  the  instinct  for  self-preservation, 
and  these  situations  he  usually  images  in  a 
chase  or  pursuit.  In  The  Spy  the  two  pursuits 
of  Harvey  Birch  are  the  central  interest,  and 
the  whole  book  reflects  the  running  fight 
between  the  two  sides,  not  only  in  the  stir  of 
the  action,  but  in  the  unusual  characters, 
which  are  such  as  flourish  only  in  moments 
so  critical.  Cooper's  feeling  for  settled  so 
ciety  is  always  strong;  he  differs  from  other 
chroniclers  of  the  frontier  in  the  care  with 
which  he  insists  upon  normal  standards  of 
civilization;  in  The  Spy  the  Tory  family  and 
Washington  himself  are  felt  to  be  the  product 
of  desirable  order.  But  along  with  them,  in 
the  upheaval  of  war,  are  set  such  frontier 
types  as  Lawton,  the  Skinner,  Harvey  Birch 
— types  who  would  not  have  a  career  at  all 
on  the  Westchester  scene,  if  that  scene  were 
not  suddenly  reduced  to  a  frontier  condition. 
Harvey  Birch  reminds  us  of  those  ultra- 
romantic  heroes  in  Byron  and  Scott  who 
stand  outside  the  main  stream  of  life, 


JAMES  FENIMORE  COOPER         43 

doomed  and  lonely.  Leatherstocking,  Long 
Tom  Coffin,  and  Paul  Jones  are  similarly 
ultra-romantic.  It  is  misleading,  however, 
to  ascribe  this  type  in  Cooper  or  in  Scott 
to  literary  origins;  they  each  found  it  on 
a  frontier,  Scott  by  tradition  and  the  Ameri 
can  with  his  own  eyes.  Moreover,  Cooper's 
ultra-romantic  hero  differs  from  Scott's  in 
being  not  very  heroic  after  all;  at  least, 
Harvey  Birch  is  without  distinction,  pos 
sessed  of  moral  but  not  physical  courage,  and 
the  other  heroes  have  very  strict  limitations; 
they  are  American,  if  not  local,  and  the 
glamour  of  romance  is  not  on  them.  The 
indebtedness  to  Scott  in  this  novel  must 
be  acknowledged  in  less  subtle  matters — for 
example,  in  the  device  by  which  Wharton's 
colored  servant  took  his  place  in  the  camp 
jail,  as  Wamba  took  the  place  of  Cedric  in 
Ivanhoe. 

Cooper's  best  stories  usually  have  an  ultra- 
romantic  heroine,  like  Miss  Singleton  in  The 
Spy,  who  by  some  pathetic  circumstance  is 
cut  off  from  a  normal  destiny.  He  also  por 
trays  in  his  best  tales  a  very  normal  hero  and 
heroine,  admirable  but  not  remarkable,  who 
fall  in  love  and  achieve  happiness,  and  help 
to  assure  us  of  the  permanent  sanity  of  life. 
Like  Scott  and  Thackeray,  he  does  not  over 
rate  sheer  intellect  or  genius;  good  fortune 


44       GREAT  AMERICAN  WRITERS 

he  reserves  for  the  average  man.  Indeed,  he 
usually  bestows  the  shrewdest  intellect  upon 
his  villains,  of  whom  there  is  one  in  every 
story.  The  capacity  of  mankind  to  be  vil 
lainous  was  a  capital  tenet  in  his  creed.  In 
The  Spy  the  example  is  the  Skinner,  who  in 
the  last  chapters  is  satisfactorily  hanged. 

The  Pilot  was  written  upon  a  roundabout 
suggestion  from  Scott;  that  is,  a  discussion 
of  the  ignorance  of  seamanship  in  The  Pirate 
prompted  Cooper  to  illustrate  the  sailor's 
true  point  of  view.  For  that  reason  he  laid 
the  plot  just  off  shore,  where  a  ship  is  in 
greatest  danger,  and  the  story  largely  turns 
upon  the  seaman's  preference  for  deep  water, 
especially  in  a  storm.  This  setting  of  the  plot 
provides  contrasts  between  scenes  on  land  and 
on  sea,  and  gives  Cooper  the  greatest  number 
of  chases  or  pursuits — the  kind  of  episode  he 
excelled  in.  The  frigate  among  the  shoals, 
the  wreck  of  the  Ariel,  the  running  fight  with 
the  British  man-of-war — these  glimpses  of  the 
sailor's  life  are  not  surpassed  in  fiction. 

The  story  has  the  usual  complement  of 
Cooper  characters, — the  lovers,  the  villain, 
the  ultra-romantic  types.  The  interest,  how 
ever,  is  divided  by  two  persons,  Paul  Jones 
and  Long  Tom.  The  latter  is  a  sort  of 
Leatherstocking  at  sea — a  product  of  the 
New  England  coast,  as  Leatherstocking  is  of 


JAMES  FENIMORE  COOPER          45 

the  New  York  forest,  fatalistic,  unpoetical, 
capable,  and  lonely.  The  reader  has  difficulty 
in  thinking  of  Long  Tom  apart  from  the  land 
version  of  his  type,  and  perhaps  Cooper 
could  not  dissociate  them;  the  final  impres 
sion  is  that  Long  Tom  is  out  of  keeping  with 
his  surroundings,  and  as  Leatherstocking  is 
always  in  keeping  with  his,  the  deduction, 
however  unwarranted,  is  that  Cooper  in  The 
Pilot  arbitrarily  sent  his  greatest  character 
to  sea. 

Paul  Jones  is  the  most  romantic  person  in 
the  book.  Something  of  the  Byronic  mood 
is  in  his  mysterious  comings  and  goings,  his 
theatrical  posings  in  moments  of  danger,  his 
extreme  egotism.  He  belongs  as  perfectly  to 
the  wild  scene  of  the  story  as  Long  Tom  seems 
foreign  to  it,  and  it  is  evidence  of  Cooper's 
literary  tact  that  the  mysterious  pilot  is  left 
on  the  strange  coast  where  first  he  was  found. 
We  are  not  convinced  that  Paul  Jones  really 
cherishes  the  passion  that  Cooper  credits  him 
with;  at  least  Alice  Dunscombe  seems  no 
proper  inspiration  for  such  a  genius.  His 
moodiness  is  not  from  blighted  love,  but  from 
some  essential  melancholy,  of  a  kind  that 
Cooper  never  drew  so  sentimentally  again. 

In  spite  of  the  many  great  qualities  of 
these  two  stories,  however,  it  is  on  the  se 
ries  of  Leatherstocking  Tales  that  Cooper's 


46       GREAT  AMERICAN  WRITERS 

fame  rests.  Not  only  is  Leatherstocking  his 
one  important  contribution  to  world  fiction, 
but  the  description  of  the  moving  frontier, 
from  novel  to  novel,  is  majestic  beyond 
anything  else  in  American  literature.]  In 
its  motion  this  frontier  differed  radically 
from  Scott's  stationary  and  historic  border. 
The  tide  of  new-world  civilization  sweeping 
westward  presented  fresh  aspects  at  every 
stage,  and  its  breaking  wave  could  never 
repeat  the  journey.  In  his  record  of  it  Cooper 
seized  the  most  epic  of  American  moments,  a 
climax  of  destiny,  and  to  no  follower  of  his 
was  the  material  available  for  a  second 
account. 

Probably  no  imitator  would  have  ap 
proached  his  use  of  the  opportunity,  for 
he  had  a  very  unusual  gift — somewhat 
akin  to  his  skill  in  describing  a  chase — of 
reproducing  a  changing  scene  and  an  aging 
character.  Deerslayer  becomes  Hawk-eye, 
then  the  Pathfinder,  then  Leatherstocking, 
then  the  Trapper;  and  in  the  changes  he  is 
always  the  same  character,  simply  growing 
old.  He  is  accompanied  in  his  aging  by  a 
parallel  waste  of  the  primitive  forest,  as 
though  he  were  a  kind  of  wood  god,  or  at  least 
in  some  more  than  poetic  sense  brother  to  the 
trees.  In  The  Deerslayer  and  The  Last  of  the 
Mohicans  the  forest  is  primitive;  in  The 


JAMES  FENIMORE  COOPER         47 

Pathfinder  it  begins  to  be  broken  with  the 
settlements;  in  The  Pioneers  the  cutting  of 
lumber  is  a  cause  of  real  pain  to  the  old 
hunter;  and  in  The  Prairie  the  trees  have 
disappeared  and  the  tree-lover  dies  on  the 
plains. 

The  development  of  Leatherstocking's  char 
acter  is  the  more  extraordinary  because 
Cooper,  who  is  not  usually  considered  a  lit 
erary  artist,  has  kept  the  portrait  consist 
ently  true.  The  young  hunter  from  the 
Delaware  settlements  is  curiously  simple, 
with  no  learning,  nor  with  much  intellectual 
curiosity.  Although  created  by  one  of  the 
most  politically  ardent  of  Americans,  he  has 
no  political  nor  even  social  interests, — he  is 
lonely  as  the  forest  tree,  and  pure-hearted  as 
a  child.  Yet  Cooper  does  not  represent  him 
as  the  ideal  primitive  man  that  would  have 
pleased  a  Rousseau  or  a  Chateaubriand; 
Leatherstocking  has  almost  a  colloquial  re 
ality.  Even  his  skill  with  the  rifle  is  liable 
to  occasional  lapses,  and  the  Indians  outdo 
him  in  woodcraft.  His  chief  American  trait, 
which  he  conspicuously  shares  with  Long 
Tom,  is  his  fatalism;  in  the  virgin  world 
he  reads  the  decree  of  civilization  and  resigns 
himself  to  it,  although  to  him  it  is  in  no  respect 
a  welcome  prophecy. 

In  Leatherstocking  is  incorporated  Cooper's 


48       GREAT  AMERICAN  WRITERS 

great  love  of  the  woods.  This  incarnation  is 
often  overlooked  by  readers  to  whom  the  In 
dian  is  more  obviously  the  child  of  the  forest. 
The  red  men  Cooper  habitually  endows  with 
skill  in  scouting  and  trailing,  as  though  they 
had  some  extra  animal  sense;  but  they  are 
nowhere  represented  as  conscious  lovers  of 
nature.  It  needs  only  careful  reading  to  see 
that  they  do  not  even  figure  as  heroes  in 
these  stories;  so  conscientiously  does  Cooper 
refrain  from  idealizing  them,  that  he  shows 
their  treachery  and  cruelty,  their  lust  for 
revenge  and  their  dulness  of  feeling,  even 
while  he  delights  in  their  courage.  And  the 
great  chief,  the  father  of  Uncas,  dies  a  drunk 
ard  in  the  settlements.  Yet  this  much  truth 
is  in  the  familiar  criticism  of  Cooper's  Indi 
ans,  that  though  he  may  not  idealize  them, 
his  readers  do,  the  world  over. 

The  best  story  of  the  series,  perhaps  the 
best  he  wrote,  is  The  Last  of  the  Mohicans. 
The  fact  that  both  Leatherstocking  and  his 
Indian  comrades  are  here  seen  at  their  best, 
and  that  the  plot  represents  two  long  forest 
chases,  with  only  a  slight  interim,  and  with 
infinite  opportunity  for  the  craft  of  the  trail, 
explains  the  power  of  the  book.  Yet  two 
other  stories,  the  first  and  last  of  the  series, 
are  more  poetic.  The  Deer  slayer  not  only  in 
troduces  us  to  the  young  hunter  before  he 


JAMES  FENIMORE  COOPER         49 

has  ever  killed  a  man,  or  has  ever  seen  an  in 
land  lake,  but  it  brings  him  face  to  face  with 
Judith  Hutter,  the  most  interesting  woman 
Cooper  drew.  Of  his  other  heroines  there  are 
no  enthusiastic  admirers,  but  Judith  Hutter 
is  a  kind  of  apparition  of  the  civilization  which 
Leatherstocking  rejects,  crossing  his  fate  at 
the  moment  when  he  might  make  a  different 
choice.  That  her  past  is  dishonorable  seems 
a  proper  barrier  between  her  and  the  youth 
to  whom  purity  is  above  all  other  virtues,  but 
probably  no  reader  ever  closed  the  book 
without  a  sentiment  of  regret,  into  which 
the  whole  scene  of  the  lake  and  the  dwellers 
on  it  is  gathered.  In  The  Prairie  the  poetic 
element  is  grand  rather  than  sentimental; 
all  things  in  the  book  are  large,  from  the 
great  horizon  sweeps  to  the  giant  sons  of  the 
squatter,  Ishmael  Bush.  For  the  soul  of 
Leatherstocking  in  his  declining  years,  this 
setting  does  not  seem  too  vast.  But  its  pic 
torial  quality  has  not  received  generally  the 
praise  it  deserves,  nor  has  the  elemental  power 
been  recognized  which  makes  this  one  story 
so  unlike  any  writing  with  which  Cooper's 
tales  are  usually  compared. 

From  the  time  that  Cooper  went  abroad  he 
seemed  governed  by  some  perverse  fate  that 
rendered  his  conduct  as  well  as  his  work 
tactless  and  unfortunate.  He  lost  popular- 


50       GREAT  AMERICAN  WRITERS 

ity  on  the  Continent  by  his  somewhat  vig-x 
orous  Americanism,  and  he  managed  to  incur 
the  dislike  of  his  countrymen  by  some  well- 
meant  but  unsolicited  discussion  as  to  the 
relative  merits  of  French  and  American  taxa 
tion.  That  he  was  only  supporting  Gen 
eral  Lafayette,  who  had  praised  the  govern 
ment  of  the  United  States,  did  not  count  with 
those  whom  he  had  irritated.  When  he  re 
turned  to  his  country,  therefore,  he  had  ex 
pressed  his  general  attitude  toward  old-world 
institutions  in  three  not  very  important 
stories,  The  Bravo,  1831,  The  Heidenmauer, 
1832,  and  The  Headsman,  1833;  and  he  had 
laid  the  foundation  of  much  ill-will  towards 
himself  at  home.  This  ill-will  soon  precipi 
tated  itself  in  a  quarrel  with  his  neighbors  at 
Cooperstown  over  a  piece  of  land  which  his 
father  had  left  him.  Criticism  of  him  spread 
recklessly  in  the  newspapers,  and  he  soon 
had  excellent  grounds  for  libel  suits.  From 
1837  to  1842  he  was  engaged  in  the  unamiable 
task  of  prosecuting  editors  either  on  these 
grounds  or  because  of  attacks  upon  his  history 
of  the  United  States  Navy,  1839.  That  he 
won  almost  all  the  cases,  and  that  he  was 
legally  in  the  right  throughout,  did  not  render 
him  more  lovable  to  his  critics,  and  the  quar 
rels  tainted  his  mind,  so  that  all  his  later 
books  were  controversial  and  otherwise  infe- 


JAMES  FENIMORE  COOPER         51 

rior.  The  great  fame  of  his  best  stories,  how 
ever,  steadily  increased  throughout  the  world, 
and  his  last  years  were  happy  in  the  returning 
consciousness  of  America's  pride  in  him.  He 
died  at  Cooperstown,  September  14,  1851. 

Although  America  produced  many  novel 
ists  during  the  thirty  years  of  Cooper's  liter 
ary  life, — Dr.  Robert  M.  Bird,  Charles  Fenno 
Hoffman,  Miss  Catherine  Maria  Sedgwick,  for 
example, — his  chief  disciple  and  the  only 
writer  to  whom,  besides  Herman  Melville,  we 
need  devote  a  few  words  here  was  the  best 
known  of  Southern  novelists,  William  Gil- 
more  Simms.  He  was  the  son  of  a  brilliant 
and  irresponsible  Irishman  who  settled  in 
Charleston,  South  Carolina,  just  after  the 
Revolution,  and  there  married  Miss  Harriet 
Ann  Augusta  Singleton.  William  Gilmore, 
the  second  child,  was  born  in  Charleston, 
April  17,  1806.  His  mother  died,  and  the 
erratic  father,  having  become  a  bankrupt, 
disappeared  into  the  Tennessee  wilderness. 

The  boy  was  cared  for  by  his  maternal 
grandmother,  Mrs.  Gates,  who  brought  him 
up  most  wisely,  storing  his  head  with  tales 
of  wholesome  adventure  and  legends  of  the 
Revolution,  until  his  imagination  was  com 
pletely  fired.  Less  romantically  he  was  in 
time  apprenticed  as  a  drug  clerk,  with  the 
general  idea  of  studying  medicine,  but  when 


52       GREAT  AMERICAN  WRITERS 

his  term  was  up  he  entered  a  law  office. 
Meanwhile  his  astounding  father  had  re 
turned  and  had  tried  to  kidnap  him,  appar 
ently  thinking  that  the  grandmother  would 
not  otherwise  surrender  the  child;  but  Mrs. 
Gates  had  taught  the  son  to  think  well  of  the 
runaway  father,  and  now  she  invited  the 
elder  Simms  to  make  them  a  visit,  in  1816  or 
1817.  Such  stories  he  told  of  the  Cherokees 
and  the  Creeks,  that  William  Gilmore  had  to 
journey  to  Mississippi  with  his  father  in 
1824  or  1825,  as  a  sort  of  climax  to  his  roman 
tic  reading.  He  was  already  engaged  to 
Miss  Anna  Malcolm  Giles,  and  had  written 
his  first  poetry. 

Not  until  1827  was  he  admitted  to  the 
bar,  and  on  October  19,  1826,  he  was  married. 
Although  his  verse  had  produced  some  local 
effect,  he  was  of  course  practically  penniless, 
and  it  is  not  clear  how  he  supported  his  new 
home.  From  1827  he  continually  published 
volumes  of  poetry,  convinced  that  his  career 
lay  in  that  field;  he  also  ventured  into  jour 
nalism,  and  in  the  exciting  politics  of  the 
time  he  took  a  firm  stand  and  made  enemies. 
In  1831  a  torch-light  procession  of  his  oppo 
nents  almost  mobbed  him  in  front  of  the 
office  of  the  paper  hi  which  he  had  part 
ownership.  The  following  year  his  partner 
died,  the  paper  failed,  and  he  went  into  bank- 


JAMES  FENIMORE  COOPER         53 

ruptcy.  In  this  year  also  his  wife  died.  His 
father  and  Mrs.  Gates  were  already  dead. 

With  every  reason  for  desiring  a  change  of 
scene,  Simms  was  persuaded  to  seek  his  liter 
ary  fortunes  in  the  North,  and  he  accordingly 
visited  Massachusetts.  He  made  his  first 
appearance  with  a  long  poem,  and  followed 
it  by  an  unimportant  story,  Martin  Faber, 
1833,  which  yet  had  success  enough  to  en 
courage  him.  The  next  year  he  published  the 
first  of  his  border  romances,  Guy  Rivers,  and 
immediately  afterward  wrote  and  published 
The  Yemassee,  his  well-known  Indian  story. 
That  the  book  owed  something  to  Cooper 
was  at  once  apparent;  the  Indian  family  in 
it  can  hardly  escape  comparison  with  Chin- 
gachgook  and  Hist  and  Uncas.  But  the 
comparison  is  not  greatly  to  Simms's  disad 
vantage.  His  genius  was  less  simple  than 
Cooper's;  he  liked  a  wild  abandon  of  ad 
venture  for  its  own  sake,  and  in  the  welter  of 
events  the  characters,  in  some  of  his  books, 
have  to  look  out  for  themselves;  but  in  The 
Yemassee  the  Southern  Indians  are  realisti 
cally  drawn,  and  form  an  indispensable  com 
plement  to  Cooper's  picture  of  the  Northern 
tribes.  The  historical  background  of  the 
story  is,  artistically  speaking,  negligible. 

In  1835  The  Partisan  was  published,  the 
first  of  Simms's  important  series  of  novels  on 


54       GREAT  AMERICAN  WRITERS 

Revolutionary  conditions  in  South  Carolina. 
Katherine  Walton,  1851,  and  Woodcraft,  1852, 
are  other  parts  of  the  one  panorama  which 
deals  with  the  war  and  the  unsettled  condi 
tion  afterwards  much  as  Cooper's  great  series 
deals  with  the  frontier.  As  a  plot-maker 
Simms  always  outdoes  Cooper,  but  his  inven 
tion  is  too  luxuriant  for  its  own  good;  the 
series  of  stories  seem  increasingly  formless  to 
the  modern  reader,  although  Hurricane  Nell, 
in  Eutaw,  1856,  and  Lieutenant  Porgy,  in 
Woodcraft,  could  not  easily  be  spared  from 
the  few  important  characters  hi  American 
fiction,  and  some  of  the  individual  scenes 
are  tragically  powerful. 

The  success  of  his  writings,  which  included 
some  books  now  hardly  worth  recording, 
brought  to  Simms  the  happiest  period  of  his 
life.  In  1836  he  had  married  Miss  Chevilette 
Roach,  of  Barnwell,  South  Carolina,  and  her 
estate  of  Woodlands  soon  became  famous  as 
his  home.  Here  he  entertained  his  friends 
with  something  of  Scott's  feudal  hospitality, 
working  the  while  on  his  books.  Fortune 
was  making  of  him  a  typical  Southern  man 
of  property,  as  well  as  the  leading  Southern 
man  of  letters;  his  condition  of  life  was  plac 
ing  him  where  he  would  become  a  natural 
champion  of  the  South  against  the  North  in 
the  approaching  struggle.  He  accepted  the 


JAMES  FENIMORE  COOPER         55 

obligations  of  his  position,  and  spoke  out  as 
honestly  and  uncompromisingly  for  slavery 
as  Mrs.  Stowe  had  spoken  against  it. 

When  the  war-cloud  broke,  however, 
Simms  suffered  more  than  his  share  of  ill 
fortune.  In  1860,  as  though  by  way  of  omen, 
his  house  in  Charleston  was  burned  down. 
In  1861  two  of  his  children  died  of  fever,  and 
the  next  year  the  larger  part  of  his  house 
at  Woodlands  was  destroyed  by  fire.  His 
wife  died  in  1863.  He  was  in  Columbia  dur 
ing  the  sacking  of  the  city  by  Sherman's 
troops,  and  the  rest  of  Woodlands  was  burned 
either  by  the  same  troops  or  by  negroes. 
Simms  bore  each  successive  blow  with  forti 
tude.  He  made  a  bare  living  by  journalistic 
work,  and  supplemented  his  earnings  by  sell 
ing  his  historical  and  autograph  collections. 
He  even  partially  rebuilt  Woodlands  and 
began  to  write  more  stories,  but  his  health 
suddenly  broke  under  the  long  strain.  He 
died  at  Charleston,  June  11,  1870. 

It  was  in  the  fertility  and  excitement  of  his 
plots  that  Simms  excelled  Cooper,  and  in  this 
phase  of  the  development  of  the  American 
novel  he  in  turn  is  rivalled  by  the  friend  of 
Hawthorne,  Herman  Melville,  born  in  New 
York,  August  1, 1819.  Of  an  excellent  fam 
ily  much  honored  for  its  patriotism,  Melville 
early  showed  his  preference  for  a  roving  life, 


56       GREAT  AMERICAN  WRITERS 

took  to  the  sea,  and  for  some  years  picked  rp 
what  education  could  be  got  from  rough 
sailing  in  various  parts  of  the  world.  This 
period  of  his  life  had  its  climax  on  one  of  the 
Marquesas  islands,  when  he  was  captured  by 
cannibals  and  with  difficulty  rescued.  He 
turned  the  experience  to  account  in  his  first 
story,  Typee:  a  Peep  at  Polynesian  Life  dur 
ing  a  Four  Months9  Residence  in  a  Valley  of 
the  Marquesas,  1846. 

The  success  of  this  novel  brought  Melville 
back  into  a  more  settled  life.  After  some 
residence  at  Pittsfield,  Massachusetts,  he 
returned  to  New  York  and  accepted  an  office 
in  the  Custom  House.  Of  his  other  stories,  the 
best  are  Omoo:  a  Narrative  of  Adventures  in 
the  South  Seas,  1847,  and  Moby  Dick,  or  the 
White  Whale,  1851.  This  last  is  his  master 
piece.  Not  even  Cooper  could  surpass  the 
grandeur  of  its  sea-pictures,  and  some  of  its 
adventurous  episodes  have  an  uncanny  quality 
found  nowhere  else.  Melville  could  not  re 
peat  this  success,  nor  again  approach  it.  He 
died  in  New  York,  September  28,  1891. 

The  work  of  Simms,  for  extent  and  con 
temporary  importance,  is  far  more  worthy  of 
attention  than  all  of  Melville's  writing,  with 
the  one  exception  of  Moby  Dick;  and  the 
character  of  Simms  was  most  engaging.  But 
his  novels  are  now  hardly  known  by  name, 


NATHANIEL  HAWTHORNE          57 

whereas  the  praise  of  Stevenson  and  other 
craftsmen  near  at  hand  has  given  Melville's 
best  work  a  new  lease  of  life.  Yet  above 
them  both  Cooper  still  keeps  his  secure  place, 
not  much  injured  by  unsympathetic  criticism, 
nor  even  by  some  condescending  praise. 

CHAPTER  IV 

NATHANIEL  HAWTHORNE 

NATHANIEL  HAWTHORNE,  the  next  great 
master  of  American  fiction,  was  born  in 
Salem,  Massachusetts,  July  4,  1804,  the  son 
of  Nathaniel  Hawthorne  and  Elizabeth  Clarke 
Manning.  The  father  was  a*  sea-captain, 
like  others  of  his  sturdy  ancestry;  the  mother 
was  the  daughter  of  a  house  as  sturdy,  also 
English  in  extraction.  It  was  from  his 
mother  that  the  boy  was  to  take  his  deepest 
imprint  of  character,  for  his  father  died  in 
1808.  From  that  time  until  her  death  Madam 
Hawthorne  lived  secluded,  never  eating  a 
meal  with  her  family,  and  shutting  herself 
up  in  her  room.  An  older  and  a  younger 
sister  were  Nathaniel's  playmates. 

From  the  fall  of  1818  to  the  summer  of 
1819  the  family  lived  at  Raymond,  Maine, 
where  the  grandfather  Manning  had  bought 
large  tracts,  and  where  a  house  was  erected 


58        GREAT  AMERICAN  WRITERS 

for  the  widow  and  her  children  by  Robert 
Manning,  her  brother.  Here  the  boy  got  his 
knowledge  of  the  woods,  and  was  confirmed 
in  those  habits  of  loneliness  which  indeed  his 
home  life  anywhere  would  have  bred  in  him. 

He  had  acquired  a  love  of  books  even 
before  leaving  Salem,  and  now  in  1819  upon 
his  return  for  two  years  of  preparation  for 
college,  it  was  in  the  love  of  books  that  he 
chiefly  prepared  himself.  When  he  entered 
Bowdoin  College,  in  the  summer  of  1821, 
he  must  have  been  one  of  the  best  read 
students,  if  we  may  judge  from  his  letters 
to  his  mother  and  his  sisters.  But  Long 
fellow  was  a  classmate  of  his,  and  clearly 
outshone  him  in  study;  Franklin  Pierce, 
afterwards  President,  was  his  best  friend  in 
the  class  ahead  of  him;  and  even  without 
those  rivals  Hawthorne  would  not  have  ex 
celled  as  a  scholar.  He  was  given  to  reck 
lessness,  barely  escaped  getting]  into  serious 
trouble,  along  with  others  of  his  set,  for  card 
playing;  and  upon  graduation  he  was  an 
officer  of  the  Navy  Club,  an  organization  of 
those  Seniors  who  had  no  commencement 
part. 

Upon  his  return  to  Salem  Hawthorne 
drifted  into  his  literary  career,  rather  for 
lack  of  something  else  to  do  than  for  any 
purpose.  At  least  that  is  the  impression 


NATHANIEL  HAWTHORNE          59 

which  he  himself  gives  us.  But  the  patience 
with  which  he  now  began  and  continued  to 
practise  and  perfect  his  art,  even  though  he 
had  no  public,  indicates  some  guiding  motive. 
His  first  publication  was  Fanshawe,  a  short 
novel,  printed  in  Boston  in  1828  at  his  own 
expense.  The  story  was  the  work  of  an 
amateur  and,  aside  from  some  merits  which 
would  not  be  unexpected  in  any  cultured 
writing,  it  had  no  claim  to  general  attention. 
Hawthorne's  real  genius  found  its  significant 
beginning  in  the  contributions  he  now  made 
to  various  magazines  and  annuals — contri 
butions  often  unsigned,  or  over  a  pseudonym. 
The  annual  most  friendly  to  him  was  The 
Token,  edited  by  "Peter  Parley,"  S.  G. 
Goodrich.  To  this  publication  Hawthorne 
contributed  Roger  Malvin's  Burial,  The  Gentle 
Boy,  and  other  stories.  In  The  New  England 
Magazine  also  his  work  regularly  found  a  wel 
come.  But  he  made  no  real  reputation,  and 
in  money  he  was  scantly  paid.  Through  the 
kind  offices  of  Goodrich  he  was  engaged  by 
a  Boston  firm  as  editor  of  an  ambitious 
project,  The  American  Magazine  of  Useful 
and  Entertaining  Knowledge.  His  salary  was 
to  be  five  hundred  dollars.  But  he  had 
hardly  got  the  magazine  started,  in  1836, 
when  the  publishers  failed,  and  the  engage 
ment  proved  to  be  for  him  nothing  more 


60       GREAT  AMERICAN  WRITERS 

than  an  annoying  loss  of  time  and  energy. 
Perhaps  by  way  of  comfort  Goodrich  en 
gaged  Hawthorne  with  his  sister  Elizabeth 
to  write  one  of  the  Peter  Parley  books, — a 
geographical  history  or  a  historical  geography, 
— for  which,  although  the  book  sold  well,  the 
authors  received  only  a  hundred  dollars. 

However  unsuccessful  Hawthorne  had 
been,  he  had  at  least  impressed  his  intimate 
friends  with  an  enduring  faith  in  his  ability. 
It  was  his  old  college  mate  Horatio  Bridge 
who  now  thought  of  a  way  to  make  Haw 
thorne's  genius  known  to  the  world.  Con 
vinced  that  the  various  sketches  would 
appeal  to  a  wide  public  if  once  they  were 
brought  together  in  a  presentable  volume, 
he  made  an  arrangement  through  Good 
rich,  without  Hawthorne's  knowledge,  with 
a  Boston  publisher,  whereby  he  guaranteed 
the  cost  of  the  volume,  the  profits  of  which 
were  to  go  to  the  author.  Under  these 
auspices  Twice  Told  Tales  appeared  in  1837. 

The  critic,  now  looking  back,  perceives 
that  in  this  collection  were  the  germs  of 
Hawthorne's  later  stories.  Three  types  of 
writing  can  be  distinguished,  which  proved 
to  be  preliminary  sketches  for  his  three  best 
novels.  The  first  type  is  the  dramatic  scene 
dealing  with  history,  of  which  The  Gray 
Champion  and  Howes  Masquerade  are  ready 


NATHANIEL  HAWTHORNE          61 

examples.  Hawthorne  selects  a  critical  mo 
ment  of  history,  when  a  new  age  is  in  some 
fashion  to  overturn  the  past,  and  he  renders 
the  moment  dramatic  to  the  eye.  That  is, 
he  groups  his  characters  and  focuses  his  scene 
as  though  he  were  setting  a  stage  or  a  tab 
leau,  and  the  result  is  an  interpretation  of 
history;  yet  his  interpretation  gives  a  totally 
different  impression  from  Scott's,  for  example, 
or  Charles  Reade's.  Clear  as  it  is  to  the  eye, 
it  suggests  spiritual  mystery.  The  scene 
does  not  stop  with  romance,  nor  with  the 
mere  memory  of  the  past,  but  directs  atten 
tion  to  a  moral  progress,  an  evolution  of 
national  or  racial  spirit,  which  looks  more 
to  the  future  than  to  the  past.  In  this  sense 
Hawthorne  is  in  all  his  work  profoundly 
radical.  It  is  a  matter  for  wonder  that  con 
servative  criticism  has  not  generally  dis 
cerned  his  antagonism  to  all  conventional 
opinion.  Perhaps  for  such  critics  his  sig 
nificance  is  obscured  by  his  way  of  giving 
to  the  past  a  moral  purpose,  even  while 
he  is  turning  to  the  future.  He  likes  to 
incorporate  the  past  in  some  person  or  sym 
bol — in  the  Gray  Champion  himself,  or  in 
the  portrait  of  Edward  Randolph,  or  in  the 
Masquerade  that  startled  Howe;  and  this 
incarnation  he  makes  the  herald  of  some  new 
order.  The  paradox  is  less  than  it  seems. 


62       GREAT  AMERICAN  WRITERS 

For  it  is  not  the  conventional  past  that  is 
incarnated,  but  some  profound  desire,  most 
often  of  liberty,  which  the  conventional  past 
has  thwarted.  Hawthorne's  radicalism,  like 
other  radicalism,  is  but  the  persistence  of  an 
unaccomplished  ideal. 

Quite  as  important  as  the  stories  with 
historical  background  are  the  essay  sketches, 
like  The  Rill  from  the  Town  Pump,  or  David 
Swan.  Not  only  does  Hawthorne  here 
abandon  the  large  interest  of  the  historical 
crisis,  but  he  portrays  no  crisis  at  all.  These 
sketches  have  none  of  that  problem-working 
that  makes  a  plot.  They  are  in  effect  medi 
tations  upon  life.  The  reader  assumes  with 
the  author  a  passive  attitude — imagines 
himself  to  be  the  toll-gatherer,  or  to  be 
mounted  on  the  church  steeple,  or  to  be 
turned  into  the  town  pump;  and  he  then 
submits  to  the  experiences  that  appear  from 
those  points  of  view.  These  compositions 
are  not  in  the  ordinary  sense  stories,  yet  like 
Addison's  papers,  or  Irving's,  they  are  some 
thing  more  than  essays.  They  resemble 
Addison's  writing  or  Irving's  in  this  also, 
that  their  mood  is  invariably  cheerful  and 
sane.  Herein  they  contrast  with  the  melan 
choly  of  Hawthorne's  other  work.  But 
even  from  the  Addisonian  or  Irvingesque 
paper  they  differ,  for  they  convey  a  pro- 


NATHANIEL  HAWTHORNE          63 

found  significance  of  life,  a  sense  of  the  human 
destiny,  quite  as  much  as  do  the  historical 
tales.  The  inexorable  ideals  of  the  race, 
which  in  the  studies  of  history  appear  clothed 
as  the  heralds  of  the  future  in  the  dress  of  the 
past,  are  in  these  sketches  expressed  by  a 
general  sense  of  a  diffused  past,  an  authentic 
destiny,  which  might  be  called,  with  a  pleas 
ant  meaning,  fatalism. 

If  so  large  a  word  as  philosophy  may  be 
applied  to  the  significance  of  life  which  Haw 
thorne  presents  in  these  essay-tales,  it  is 
easy  to  make  their  connection  with  those 
psychological  studies  which  form  the  third 
division  of  his  work.  A  good  illustration  is 
Wakefield,  the  account  of  a  man  who  for  a 
whim  absented  himself  from  his  home,  and 
found  that  fate  blocked  his  will  to  return; 
or  Dr.  Heidegger's  Experiment,  in  which  are 
studied  half  a  dozen  old  people  who  for  an 
hour  are  rejuvenated  by  a  fountain  of  youth. 
In  these  psychological  studies,  as  in  the 
historical  scenes  and  the  sketches,  the  sense 
of  an  ordered  purpose  in  life  is  strong.  But 
their  significance  is  on  the  whole  melancholy; 
they  speak  none  of  the  sunny  trust  of  the 
essay-tales.  They  suggest  that  any  tamper 
ing  with  life's  order  is  tragic.  They  announce, 
with  various  embellishments  of  the  theme, 
that  he  who,  for  a  whim  or  for  other  cause, 


64        GREAT  AMERICAN  WRITERS 

steps  out  of  his  appointed  place,  will  find 
it  difficult  or  impossible  to  resume  his 
fate. 

Fine  as  are  the  historical  stories,  the  essay- 
tales  and  the  psychological  studies  are  more 
characteristic  of  Hawthorne  Critics  have 
in  general  conceded  this  fact,  but  have 
drawn  from  it  far  different  deductions.  It 
has  been  charged  against  Hawthorne  that 
only  rarely  did  he  exert  himself  to  put  flesh 
and  blood  upon  the  skeleton  of  his  ideas;  that 
for  the  most  part  he  is  a  somewhat  indolent 
dreamer,  content  to  adumbrate  his  themes  in 
listless  essays  and  shadowy  allegories.  The 
charge  of  intellectual  indolence,  however, 
does  not  prove  itself  to  the  students  of 
Hawthorne's  notebooks,  who  there  recognize 
with  what  elaborate  patience  he  analyzed 
life  and  perfected  his  expression  of  it.  The 
explanation  of  Hawthorne's  aloofness  must 
be  sought  elsewhere. 

It  can  be  found  first  of  all  in  his  Puritan 
inheritance,  in  that  common  temperament 
which  made  his  mother  also  a  recluse.  He 
is  the  extreme  example  of  the  reflective 
Puritan,  reinspired  by  Transcendentalism. 
He  is  peculiar  only  because  he  is  extreme, 
and  because  he  illustrates  the  type  with  so 
little  complexity.  It  should  be  remembered 
that  Emerson  and  Thoreau,  for  all  their 


NATHANIEL  HAWTHORNE          65 

inwardness  of  observation,  were  practical 
men;  but  Hawthorne  never  lived  in  any  other 
world  than  his  thought.  He  was  contempla 
tive  all  the  time,  as  the  old  Puritan  was  half 
the  time.  The  Puritan,  through  aiming  to 
accomplish  the  will  of  God,  formed  the  habit 
of  much  conscientious  self-scrutiny,  in  order 
to  be  sure  that  he  knew  what  the  will  of  God 
was.  With  the  central  doctrine  of  Tran 
scendentalism,  that  nature  in  all  its  aspects 
exists,  not  in  itself  outside  of  us,  but  in  our 
apprehension  of  it,  the  Puritan's  obligation 
to  examine  his  own  heart  was  reinforced.  In 
Hawthorne,  as  in  Emerson,  the  obligation 
was  further  strengthened  by  sympathy  with 
the  new  scientific  mood.  Indeed  New  Eng 
land  Transcendentalism  would  be  sorely  mis 
interpreted  if  it  were  taken  as  a  mere  sport 
of  the  idealistic  spirit,  for  much  of  its  appeal 
came  from  its  prophetic  recognition  of 
materialism.  This  belief,  for  example,  that 
the  true  experience  was  within,  not  outside, 
the  soul,  was  bound  up  with  the  conception 
of  the  universe  as  so  much  fixed  stimulus, 
reaching  through  various  channels  of  touch 
to  the  inner  consciousness  that  interprets  it. 
This  scientific  attitude  and  the  Transcen 
dental  mood  and  the  old  Puritan  temper, 
all  met  in  Hawthorne,  and  the  combination 
mastered  him.  In  his  characteristic  moments 


66        GREAT  AMERICAN  WRITERS 

he  was  preoccupied  with  the  effect  of  life 
upon  himself,  and  he  emphasized  the  need 
of  solitude  for  such  preoccupation.  When 
he  ventured  into  society  or  into  the  active 
world,  it  was  by  way  of  submitting  his 
nature  to  some  new  stimulus,  for  the  satis 
faction  of  scientific  curiosity.  The  effect 
of  action  was  so  much  more  important  to 
him  than  action  itself,  that  he  found  his 
vocation  only  in  meditating.  A  life  so  in 
ward  did  not,  however,  entirely  satisfy  him; 
at  times  he  was  uncomfortably  conscious  of 
a  difference  between  himself  and  other  men, 
and  craved  some  actual  contact  with  life, 
some  work  with  his  hands,  which  would 
reassure  him  of  his  affinity  with  his  fellows. 
But  even  manual  toil  became  unreal  to  him 
as  soon  as  habit  had  dulled  its  stimulus,  and 
he  longed  to  be  free  from  the  uninterpreted 
routine  to  pursue  his  isolated  meditation. 
It  is  not  surprising,  then,  nor  is  it  to  his  dis 
credit,  that  his  characteristic  stories  set 
forth  the  minimum  of  incident  with  the 
maximum  of  significance.  WTien  he  can,  he 
even  saves  himself  the  delay  necessary  for 
reproducing  the  incident,  and  begins  at 
once  to  interpret  it.  The  result  is  hardly  a 
story.  But  it  is  not  really  an  essay,  either. 
It  is  always  an  interpretation  of  one  concrete 
experience,  with  the  concrete  experience 


NATHANIEL  HAWTHORNE  67 

tending  to  omit  itself;  it  is  never  an  abstrac 
tion  of  several  incidents. 

If  Hawthorne  temperamentally  was  averse 
to  active  life,  at  least  one  result  of  the  pub 
lishing  of  Twice  Told  Tales  was  to  furnish 
him  with  an  excellent  reason  for  being  practi 
cal.  The  book  drew  the  attention  of  the 
Peabodys,  who  had  formerly  been  neighbors 
of  the  Hawthornes,  but  had  lost  sight  of 
them  during  the  year  in  Maine.  Elizabeth 
Peabody,  the  remarkable  elder  daughter  of 
the  family,  took  steps  to  renew  the  acquaint 
ance,  and  the  two  households  became  inti 
mate.  Mary  Peabody,  who  later  became 
the  wife  of  the  educator,  Horace  Mann, 
seems  overshadowed  in  the  family  memory 
by  Elizabeth's  strong  personality,  but  Sophia, 
the  youngest  sister,  was  somewiiat  set  apart 
by  invalidism  and  by  delicacy  of  nature.  All 
who  recall  her  make  her  seem  exquisite. 
When  Hawthorne  with  his  sisters  first  visited 
the  Peabody  home,  Elizabeth  tried  to  per 
suade  Sophia  to  come  down  stairs  and  greet 
them,  saying  that  the  young  writer  was 
splendid-looking,  handsomer  than  Byron. 
That  evening  Sophia  could  not  see  him,  but 
he  came  again,  and  Elizabeth  recorded  the 
scene.  "This  time  she  came  down,  in  her 
simple  white  wrapper,  and  sat  on  a  sofa. 
As  I  said,  'My  sister  Sophia/  he  rose  and 


68       GREAT  AMERICAN  WRITERS 

looked  at  her  intently — he  did  not  realize  how 
intently.  As  we  went  on  talking,  she  would 
frequently  interpose  a  remark,  in  her  low 
sweet  voice.  Every  time  she  did  so,  he  would 
look  at  her  again,  with  the  same  piercing 
indrawing  gaze.  I  was  struck  with  it,  and 
thought,  'What  if  he  should  fall  in  love  with 
her!'  And  the  thought  troubled  me;  for 
she  had  often  told  me  that  nothing  would 
ever  tempt  her  to  marry  and  inflict  on  a 
husband  the  care  of  an  invalid." 

But  Hawthorne  soon  persuaded  Sophia 
Peabody  to  engage  herself  to  him.  The 
betrothal,  however,  was  to  be  kept  secret 
until  he  should  make  a  more  substantial 
place  in  the  world.  At  this  juncture  his 
friends  came  to  his  aid,  and  got  him  the 
appointment  as  weigher  and  ganger  in  the 
Boston  Custom  House,  where  George  Ban 
croft,  the  historian,  was  collector  of  the  port. 
His  duties  began  in  January,  1839. 

His  diary  gives  the  best  account  of  this 
experience,  which  at  first  afforded  him  a 
pleasant  though  not  enthusiastic  sense  of 
contact  with  actual  life,  and  ended  in  com 
plete  dissatisfaction  with  the  uninspiring 
routine.  The  minute  accounts  of  the  coal 
ships  in  which  he  did  his  weighing,  and  of 
the  strong,  individual  men  with  whom  he 
did  his  work,  are  at  the  beginning  of  his 


NATHANIEL  HAWTHORNE          69 

experience  very  important,  as  though  he 
were  recording  phenomena  for  later  medita 
tion.  But  his  suppressed  personality  soon 
reasserted  itself.  Within  a  year  the  diary 
becomes  almost  complaining.  When  his 
duties  were  changed  from  weighing  coal  to 
inspecting  salt  vessels,  he  wrote,  "I  am  con 
vinced  that  Christian's  burden  consisted  of 
coal;  and  no  wonder  he  felt  relieved,  when 
it  fell  off  and  rolled  into  the  sepulchre."  The 
chief  significance,  however,  of  Hawthorne's 
experience  at  the  Boston  Custom  House  as 
he  recorded  it  in  his  journal  is,  that  he  for  a 
time  strove  to  find  his  interest  in  the  outer 
world,  but  in  spite  of  his  effort  he  gradually 
returned  to  his  natural  introspection. 

In  April,  1841,  a  change  of  administration 
ended  his  employment.  The  two  years  had 
not  advanced  his  prospect  of  matrimony. 
In  1840  the  Peabodys  had  moved  to  Boston, 
where  Elizabeth  Peabody  started  a  book 
store  and  became  the  publisher  of  The 
Dial.  Perhaps  at  her  suggestion,  Hawthorne 
had  brought  out,  between  November,  1840, 
and  February,  1841,  three  books  for  children 
— Grandfather's  Chair,  Famous  Old  People, 
and  Liberty  Tree,  a  series  of  historical  tales 
of  early  New  England,  written  with  an 
obvious  educational  purpose.  During  these 
two  years  he  had  accomplished  no  other 


70       GREAT  AMERICAN  WRITERS 

writing,  except  the  entries  in  his  notebook. 
His  only  tangible  profit  was  the  sum  of  one 
thousand  dollars,  which  he  had  saved. 

He  immediately  invested  this  sum  in  the 
Brook  Farm  colony,  and  joined  the  Tran- 
scendentalist  experiment, — moved  more  by  a 
properly  selfish  hope  of  finding  a  home  to 
which  to  take  a  bride,  than  by  great  sym 
pathy  with  the  enterprise.  His  notebook, 
as  usual,  gives  the  inner  history  of  his  expe 
rience.  He  tried  to  learn  farming,  gladly  did 
his  share  of  the  work,  and  enjoyed  the  society 
of  the  remarkable  men  and  women  gathered 
in  the  community.  But  within  a  month  his 
life  had  become  a  burden.  The  leisure  for 
writing  which  he  had  expected  did  not  come, 
or  was  useless  because  he  was  weary  with 
bodily  toil;  and  true  to  his  temper,  he  craved 
opportunity  to  meditate  and  reflect.  "Oh, 
labor  is  the  curse  of  the  world,"  he  wrote, 
"and  nobody  can  meddle  with  it  without 
becoming  proportionally  brutified.  Is  it  a 
praiseworthy  matter  that  I  have  spent  five 
golden  months  in  providing  food  for  cows 
and  horses?  It  is  not  so."  In  September  he 
visited  his  people  in  Salem,  already  convinced 
that  Brook  Farm  was  doomed.  When  he 
returned  to  it,  therefore,  it  was  only  to  use 
it  as  a  temporary  lodging,  and  to  do  some 
unimportant  writing.  By  the  beginning  of 


NATHANIEL  HAWTHORNE  71 

1842,  having  no  prospects,  and  having  lost 
the  investment  in  Brook  Farm,  he  and  Sophia 
Peabody  decided  to  share  their  poverty. 
They  were  married  in  Boston,  July  9,  1842, 
and  went  at  once  to  live  at  Concord,  in  the 
house  called  the  Old  Manse. 

Here,  where  Emerson's  grandfather  had 
dwelt,  and  later  Dr.  Ezra  Ripley,  the  Haw- 
thornes  led  a  very  happy  but  very  quiet  life 
for  three  years.  It  is  perhaps  difficult  to  see 
how  they  met  expenses,  even  by  the  austere 
frugality  we  know  they  practised.  Just 
why  Hawthorne  wrote  so  little  is  at  first 
hard  to  understand,  but  doubtless  his  tem 
perament  needed  leisure  to  meditate  on  the 
many  new  experiences  that  crowded  his  days. 
His  journal  shows  how  almost  silenced  his 
genius  was  in  the  happiness  of  his  love.  For 
neighbors  he  had  Emerson  and  Margaret 
Fuller -and  the  Ellery  Channings;  some  of 
his  creative  energy  may  have  been  drawn  off 
in  the  brilliant  talks  with  such  stimulating 
friends.  The  old  desire  to  toil  with  his  hands 
he  satisfied  at  last  in  a  pleasant  way,  by 
helping  his  bride  in  household  work  or  by 
caring  for  his  garden.  This  was  his  daily 
life,  practically,  until  1843,  when  he  resumed 
his  writing.  Besides  editing  his  friend 
Bridge's  Journal  of  an  African  Cruiser,  he 
wrote  many  of  the  stories  published  in  New 


72       GREAT  AMERICAN  WRITERS 

York  in  1846  under  the  title  of  Mosses  from 
an  Old  Manse.  It  is  not  clear  that  all  of 
these  stories  were  written  at  this  time,  for 
the  collection  is  different  in  no  essential 
from  Twice  Told  Tales.  But  before  the 
appearance  of  this  second  collection  Haw 
thorne  was  in  actual  need.  His  first  child, 
Una,  was  born  March  3,  1844;  the  increased 
expense  of  the  family  made  it  impossible  to 
subsist  mainly  on  the  garden  fruit  and 
vegetables.  At  this  juncture,  one  day  in 
May,  1845,  Horatio  Bridge,  who  had  been 
sponsor  for  the  Twice  Told  Tales,  came  with 
Franklin  Pierce  to  visit  Hawthorne.  They 
had  had  an  idea  that  he  must  need  help, 
and  their  visit  by  itself  gave  him  cheerful 
encouragement.  The  following  summer 
Bridge  used  his  political  influence  in  his 
friend's  behalf,  and  on  March  23,  1846, 
Hawthorne  was  appointed  Surveyor  of  the 
Salem  Custom  House. 

In  October,  1845,  in  expectation  of  the 
appointment,  he  had  given  up  the  Old  Manse 
and  returned  to  Salem,  to  share  his  home  with 
his  mother  and  sisters.  As  his  family  in 
creased,  he  was  forced  to  move  into  a  sepa 
rate,  larger  house,  and  then  into  a  still  larger 
one  where  his  mother  and  sisters  joined  him. 
He  and  Sophia  spent  the  late  summer  and 
autumn  of  1846  in  Boston,  to  be  with  the 


NATHANIEL  HAWTHORNE          73 

Peabodys,  and  during  this  visit  the  son, 
Julian,  was  born. 

Hawthorne's  new  work  allowed  him  more 
leisure  than  he  had  enjoyed  at  the  Boston 
Custom  House,  and  he  entered  upon  his 
duties  with  more  enthusiasm  than  usual, 
almost  imagining,  he  said,  that  his  Salem 
ancestors  watched  him,  to  see  that  he  would 
prove  himself  a  capable  man.  Until  he  was 
settled  in  his  third  and  final  house,  he  had 
no  secluded  place  in  which  to  write,  and  his 
literary  work,  therefore,  for  the  first  year 
amounted  to  nothing.  But  after  November, 
1847,  he  made  a  practice  of  writing  something 
every  day,  and  the  immediate  results  were 
a  number  of  short  stories  like  those  of  the 
two  earlier  collections.  The  majority  of 
these  were  published  in  Boston,  1852,  under 
the  title  The  Snow  Image  and  Other  Twice 
Told  Tales.  Besides  this  writing  Hawthorne 
seems  to  have  meditated  much  upon  the 
theme  of  his  first  novel,  but  his  duties  at  the 
Custom  House  daily  prevented  him  from 
giving  it  the  necessary  continuous  thought. 

In  June,  1849,  with  a  change  of  political 
administration  Hawthorne  found  himself 
out  of  office.  Perhaps  he  would  have  been 
glad  to  be  free,  as  he  had  been  when  relieved 
of  his  Boston  post,  but  now  his  responsibilities 
were  heavy,  and  although  he  had  managed  to 


74        GREAT  AMERICAN  WRITERS 

clear  himself  of  all  old  debts,  he  had  saved 
nothing.  When  he  came  home,  however,  and 
told  his  wife  the  discouraging  news,  she 
exclaimed  enthusiastically,  "Oh,  then  you 
can  write  your  book!"  and  showed  him  that 
without  his  knowledge  she  had  saved  a  good 
sum  from  her  household  money.  That  after 
noon  he  began  The  Scarlet  Letter. 

This  romance  is  the  most  thoroughly 
thought  out,  the  most  completely  mastered, 
of  all  Hawthorne's  works.  Yet  it  was  com 
posed  in  the  least  propitious  circumstances. 
In  July  it  was  evident  that  his  invalid  mother 
was  dying.  Besides  the  mental  distraction 
of  his  sorrow,  Hawthorne  had  largely  the 
care  of  the  household,  as  his  wife  was  busy 
nursing  the  invalid.  Madame  Hawthorne 
died  the  last  day  of  July.  Her  illness  had 
depleted  the  family  purse,  and  the  romance 
was  far  from  finished,  and  Hawthorne  had 
no  other  assets.  For  the  last  time  in  his  life 
he  faced  poverty.  There  is  something  un 
usually  virile  in  the  steadiness  of  nerve  with 
which  he  worked  at  his  book, — nine  hours 
a  day,  as  his  wife  tells  us.  But  his  predica 
ment  could  not  be  concealed,  and  once  more 
the  friends  whose  faith  in  him  had  twice 
been  his  rescue,  gave  him  the  opportunity 
to  complete  his  work.  George  S.  Hillard, 
who  with  his  wife  had  been  the  first  guests 


NATHANIEL  HAWTHORNE          75 

at  the  Old  Manse,  wrote  to  him  January 
17,  1850,  enclosing  a  check  which  was,  he 
said,  to  represent  the  debt  Hawthorne's 
friends  owed  him  for  what  he  had  done 
for  American  literature.  This  gift  was 
probably  the  most  humiliating  kindness 
Hawthorne  ever  received,  but  he  could  not 
decline  it.  In  December,  1853,  he  had  the 
satisfaction  of  paying  it  back,  with  interest. 

Four  days  after  the  receipt  of  Hillard's 
gift,  The  Scarlet  Letter  was  finished.  Before 
Hawthorne  had  taken  it  to  a  publisher, 
James  T.  Fields  happened  to  call  upon  him, 
and  asked  for  any  available  manuscript. 
After  some  hesitation  Hawthorne  produced 
the  new  book,  which  he  had  himself  hardly 
read  over.  Fields  did  not  read  very  far  before 
he  accepted  the  great  story,  which  he  pub 
lished  in  April,  1850. 

Though  not  the  most  famous  of  American 
novels,  The  Scarlet  Letter  is  by  modern  stand 
ards  the  greatest.  It  not  only  portrays  a 
scene,  but  it  contemplates  a  profound  mean 
ing  in  life.  The  theme  is  both  subtle  and  strik 
ing,  as  very  few  of  Hawthorne's  themes  are; 
and  it  has  an  immense  application  beyond  the 
place  and  time  of  the  plot.  Hawthorne's 
genius  for  meditation  made  in  this  novel  an 
almost  universal  reach.  Perhaps  this  uni 
versality  might  be  found  also  in  The  Marble 


76       GREAT  AMERICAN  WRITERS 

Faun,  but  in  The  Scarlet  Letter  the  world 
is  displayed  with  that  conviction  of  reality 
which  Hawthorne  usually  masters  only  in 
his  dramatic  short  stories. 

The  effect  of  life  upon  the  soul  was  the 
central  interest  of  all  Hawthorne's  specula 
tions,  and  as  this  effect  is  most  formidable 
when  the  safety  of  the  soul  is  most  concerned, 
his  characteristic  theme  became  the  study 
of  sin.  In  no  other  story  did  he  state  the 
theme  with  quite  so  much  power  as  in  The 
Scarlet  Letter;  for  Dimmesdale  the  clergy 
man,  Hester  Prynne  the  erring  wife,  and 
Chillingworth  the  wronged  husband,  are 
all  strongly  developed  characters,  highly 
interesting  even  apart  from  this  special 
crisis;  and  what  each  has  done  was  done 
willfully.  The  old  physician  wronged  Hester 
when  he  compelled  her  to  marry  him — he 
himself  tells  us  he  wronged  her;  and  that 
Hester  and  Dimmesdal  knew  their  sin  is 
equally  clear.  At  first  sight  this  plot  would 
not  seem  to  illustrate  the  power  of  life  upon 
the  passive  soul ;  these  souls  are  dramatically 
responsible  for  their  actions.  But  Hawthorne 
is  rarely  interested  in  actions.  In  this  novel 
he  is  fascinated,  not  by  the  sins  committed, 
but  by  their  effect  upon  different  people. 
Hester  and  Dimmesdale — to  sum  up  the 
problem  in  brief  space — shared  the  same  sin, 


NATHANIEL  HAWTHORNE          77 

but  Hester  was  punished  for  her  guilt  and 
Dimmesdale  concealed  his;  what  were  the 
ultimate  consequences  for  each? 

Criticism  has  analyzed  the  book  in  other 
terms,  as  a  study  of  punishment.  Hester 
suffers  publicly  for  her  fault,  Dimmesdale 
secretly.  Hester  illustrates  the  inability  of 
public  vengeance  to  reach  the  sinner's  heart. 
Dimmesdale  shows  the  futility  of  private 
revenge,  for  by  pursuing  him  Chillingworth 
saves  him,  and  loses  his  own  soul.  The  pun 
ishment  that  is  effective  comes  from  within 
and  chastens  with  time;  this  seems  to  be 
the  moral  of  the  story.  Dimmesdale  at 
first  is  too  cowardly  to  confess  his  guilt,  but 
he  stands  on  the  scaffold  at  last  and  becomes 
a  free  man;  Hester  becomes  almost  a  saint 
in  patience  and  long  suffering.  From  such 
points  of  view  the  book  is  hopeful.  But  to 
take  these  points  of  view  one  must  forget  the 
original  sin,  as  Hawthorne  forgot  it;  or  the 
romance  sets  forth  the  difficult  paradox  of 
salvation  through  sin.  This  is  not  the  only 
story  in  which  Hawthorne  suggests  the  prob 
lem  of  the  good  in  evil. 

The  scarlet  letter,  the  physical  symbol 
about  which  plays  so  much  fancy,  had  been 
described  in  Endicott  and  the  Red  Cross, 
where  a  young  woman  in  the  market  place 
wears  the  shameful  design  on  her  bosom. 


78       GREAT  AMERICAN  WRITERS 

The  picturesque  symbol  had  suggested  the 
great  romance.  But  the  mood  of  Hawthorne's 
early  work  is  revived  chiefly  in  the  contrasts 
between  the  past  and  the  future,  which  largely 
give  to  The  Scarlet  Letter  its  thought-pro 
voking  quality.  The  Puritans  were  a  radical 
people,  as  compared  with  Old  England,  but 
when  once  settled  in  their  colony,  they 
became  conservative,  even  to  the  extent  of 
persecuting  all  who  disagreed  with  them. 
Against  the  Puritan  background  Hester  and 
Dimmesdale,  feeling  after  a  modern  theory 
of  the  individual's  right  to  be  happy,  seem 
centuries  younger  than  their  young  environ 
ment.  The  book  is  at  heart  radical,  and  what 
is  great  in  it  seems  still  to  belong,  not  to 
the  old  Puritan  conscience,  but  to  the 
future. 

The  success  of  this  romance  gave  Haw 
thorne  the  position  his  genius  deserved. 
Though  not  immediately  enriched,  he  was 
relieved  of  financial  worry,  and  could  proceed 
with  a  free  mind  to  his  next  story.  At  his 
mother's  death  he  had  determined  to  leave 
Salem  for  a  more  economical  home.  In  the 
spring  of  1850  he  moved  to  a  small  house  in 
Lenox,  since  burned  down,  where  he  lived 
for  a  year  and  a  half,  and  wThere  his  youngest 
child,  Rose,  was  born  in  the  spring  of  1851. 
Here  the  friends  whom  he  cared  to  see 


NATHANIEL  HAWTHORNE          79 

sought  him  out,  but  he  made  the  most  of 
his  solitude.  In  August,  1850,  he  began  his 
second  novel,  The  House  of  the  Seven  Gables, 
and  finished  it  January  26,  1851. 

This  novel  he  regarded  as  the  most  char 
acteristic  expression  of  his  genius,  because  it 
is  less  gloomy  than  The  Scarlet  Letter,  more 
complex  and  subtle.  His  readers  have  not 
agreed  as  to  its  being  characteristic,  but  the 
book  is  undoubtedly  subtle  and  in  a  pallid 
fashion  cheerful.  That  is,  there  are  gleams 
of  wintry  light  in  it,  and  the  tragedy  of  the 
plot  is,  in  a  way,  far  off.  It  is  essentially  a 
study  of  age,  as  The  Scarlet  Letter  was  essen 
tially  a  study  of  youth  and  of  youth's  radi 
calism.  There  is  here  none  of  that  radical 
prophecy  of  the  future  out  of  the  past,  which 
the  other  work  teaches  us  to  look  for.  Youth 
does  enter  the  story,  in  the  persons  of  Hoi- 
grave  and  Phoebe  and  the  child  who  buys 
gingerbread,  but  these  are  on  the  outskirts 
of  the  plot,  which  studies  the  effect  of  sin 
on  succeeding  generations,  as  The  Scarlet 
Letter  studied  its  immediate  effects.  The 
wrong  that  the  first  Pyncheon  did  to  old 
Maule,  and  the  curse  that  the  dying  Maule 
pronounced,  reproduce  themselves  in  each 
cycle  of  the  Pyncheon  family,  sin  and  curse 
growing  somewhat  thinner  and  more  phan 
tasmal  in  each  generation,  until  the  day  when 


80        GREAT  AMERICAN  WRITERS 

Hepzibah  opens  her  shop  as  a  last  help  to  her 
decayed  fortunes. 

The  peculiarity  of  Hawthorne's  treatment 
is  that  he  portrays  the  sin  in  its  ultimate 
consequences;  as  in  the  earlier  novel,  the 
causes  that  produce  the  sin,  the  characters 
of  which  it  is  the  dramatic  expression,  are 
less  to  him  than  its  influence  upon  the  third 
and  fourth  generation.  Not  only  does  the 
effect  of  the  curse  persist,  not  only  does  God 
give  the  Pyncheons  blood  to  drink,  as  Maule 
had  promised,  but  the  sin  also  reappears, 
from  father  to  son,  in  a  predisposition  to 
evil.  Whatever  may  be  the  outward  cheer 
fulness  of  the  story,  Hawthorne  imagined 
nothing  more  fatalistic  than  this  recurring 
affinity  with  evil  in  the  Pyncheon  family, 
after  a  hundred  years. 

The  descendants  of  Maule,  however,  do 
not  in  every  generation  reappear  as  the 
victims.  The  tyranny  of  the  Pyncheons 
directs  itself  against  those  of  their  own 
blood.  In  the  section  of  their  history  which 
the  novel  displays,  Clifford  and  Hepzibah 
suffer  for  their  brother's  wickedness,  and 
they  feel  it  vain  to  flee  from  their  destiny, 
because  they  carry  with  them  both  inheri 
tances,  the  sin  and  the  punishment.  For 
this  reason  they  are  perpetually  solitary 
figures,  as  indeed  are  all  the  characters  in 


NATHANIEL  HAWTHORNE          81 

the  story.  Phoebe  seems  never  really  one 
with  her  lover;  nor  do  Hepzibah  and  Clifford 
seem  to  take  up  again  their  broken  life;  nor 
does  Uncle  Venner,  pleasant  as  he  is,  seem 
to  have  any  real  part  with  the  household. 

However  dark  the  book  is,  its  fascination 
was  felt  at  once,  and  its  popularity  has 
endured  next  to  that  of  The  Scarlet  Letter. 
Not  nearly  so  much  can  be  said  of  Haw 
thorne's  third  story,  The  Blithedale  Romance, 
published  in  1852.  In  this  book  for  once 
he  left  his  gloomy  theme  of  the  influence 
of  sin;  and  evidently  his  strength  failed  him 
when  he  stood  on  less  tragic  ground.  The 
novel  is  a  romantic  version  of  his  Brook 
Farm  experiences,  many  of  the  incidents  of 
which  he  transferred  from  his  notebook;  and 
the  suicide  episode  is  also  from  his  notebook, 
from  his  Concord  life,  when  the  poet  Ellery 
Channing,  on  the  night  of  July  9,  1843,  took 
him  to  help  search  for  the  body  of  a  girl 
who  had  drowned  herself  in  the  river  nearby. 
In  the  journal  this  incident  is  powerfully 
told;  and  in  the  romance  it  is  no  less  powerful, 
being  indeed  hardly  changed  at  all.  But 
the  rest  of  the  story  is  less  effective  than  the 
journal  accounts  of  Brook  Farm,  and,  aside 
from  the  fine  character  of  Zenobia,  the  book 
is  not  greatly  remembered. 

In  June,  1852,  the  Hawthornes  returned 


82       GREAT  AMERICAN  WRITERS 

to  Concord,  and  took  up  their  residence  in 
the  house  known  as  The  Wayside.  The 
six  months  before  had  been  spent  in  West 
Newton,  near  the  scene  of  Brook  Farm. 
Hawthorne  now  felt  that  he  was  settled 
permanently.  The  sad  death  of  his  sister 
Louisa,  in  a  steamboat  disaster  on  the  Hud 
son,  disposed  him  still  further  toward  a 
retired  life.  In  1853,  however,  he  was  ap 
pointed  Consul  at  Liverpool  by  his  old 
friend,  then  President  Pierce,  and  he  took 
up  his  residence  there  in  July. 

His  foreign  notebooks  record  both  his 
official  life  until  August  31,  1857,  and  the 
two  years  of  travel  that  followed  the  termi 
nation  of  his  appointment.  Those  two  years 
were  spent  chiefly  in  Italy,  and  furnished 
him  with  the  knowledge  of  art  and  land 
scape  which  he  used  in  his  last  book.  He 
stayed  for  a  while  in  England,  on  the  way 
home,  to  complete  the  novel,  and  returned 
to  Concord  in  June,  18GO,  his  story  having 
been  published  that  spring. 

The  Marble  Faun  is  not  Hawthorne's 
greatest  romance,  but  it  is  generally  con 
sidered  most  characteristic  of  him.  It  lacks 
the  grip  on  outer  life  which  distinguishes 
The  Scarlet  Letter,  but  it  shows  in  an  almost 
exaggerated  form  Hawthorne's  power  to 
trace  the  inward  world,  especially  of  a  soul 


NATHANIEL  HAWTHORNE          83 

that  has  sinned.  What  crime  Miriam  com 
mitted  before  the  novel  begins,  we  do  not 
know,  nor  what  becomes  of  her  afterward. 
What  Donatello's  youth  was  like,  his  charm 
ing  family  legend  does  not  really  tell  us,  nor 
do  we  know  what  becomes  of  him.  But  we 
do  see  with  terrible  vividness  how  Miriam's 
past  leads  him  to  murder,  and  how  his  im 
pulsive  crime  changes  his  soul. 

Donatello  is  the  central  person  of  the 
story,  not  because  of  any  dramatic  capacity 
to  act,  but  because  he  is  passive,  illustrating 
the  power  of  experience  upon  its  victim.  He 
suggests  also  a  dark  moral  quandary;  un 
doubtedly  his  crime  and  its  consequences 
developed  in  him  a  soul.  This  perplexing 
accomplishment  of  good  out  of  evil  had  been 
illustrated  in  The  Scarlet  Letter,  and  had  been 
suggested  in  Hawthorne's  lesser  writings; 
it  was  a  fitting  theme  for  the  last  work  of 
one  who  all  his  life  had  brooded,  more  than 
most  Puritans,  on  the  intricate  relations  of 
good  and  evil. 

The  story  has  a  kind  of  surface  richness  in 
its  constant  reference  to  Rome  and  its  art 
treasures;  many  a  traveller  has  used  the 
romance  as  a  sort  of  guidebook.  Haw 
thorne's  appreciation  of  art,  however,  was 
amateurish,  and  its  value  lies  chiefly  in  his 
keen  observation,  not  of  works  of  art,  but 


84       GREAT  AMERICAN  WRITERS 

of  their  effect  upon  himself.  The  true  richness 
of  the  novel  is  in  the  multiplicity  of  direc 
tions  in  which  the  influence  of  Donatello's 
crime  is  traced.  The  chain  of  circumstances 
that  lead  the  most  innocent  member  of  the 
group  to  disclose  her  knowledge  of  the  murder, 
and  though  a  Protestant,  to  find  peace  of  mind 
in  the  Roman  confessional,  are  as  true  as  they 
are  paradoxical,  and  they  illustrate  most  typ 
ically  the  mode  of  Hawthorne's  thought. 

This  was  his  last  novel.  He  did  begin  a 
new  story,  The  Dolliver  Romance,  but  he  made 
little  progress  in  it.  He  felt  an  eerie  premon 
ition  that  his  life  was  over,  and  he  could  put 
little  heart  in  his  writing.  When  his  family 
noticed  that  his  faculties  seemed  to  fail, 
they  urged  him  to  travel  for  recreation,  and 
he  started  South  with  his  friend  and  publisher, 
W.  D.  Ticknor.  At  Philadelphia,  however, 
Ticknor  suddenly  died,  and  Hawthorne 
returned  to  Concord  broken  by  the  shock. 
In  May,  1864,  he  was  persuaded  to  travel  to 
New  Hampshire  with  his  friend  ex-President 
Pierce.  On  the  18th  of  the  month  they 
reached  Plymouth,  and  stopped  for  the  night. 
Early  next  morning  Hawthorne  was  found 
dead  in  his  bed. 

He  was  buried  at  Concord,  in  Sleepy 
Hollow,  on  the  24th.  Longfellow,  Emerson, 
Lowell,  and  Holmes  stood  by  his  grave. 


EDGAR  ALLAN  POE  85 

CHAPTER  V 

EDGAR   ALLAN   POE 

EDGAR  ALLAN  POE  has  had  the  fortune,  good 
or  bad,  to  be  one  of  the  storm-centres  of 
American  criticism.  Judgments  upon  his  life 
as  well  as  upon  his  work  have  been  excessive 
in  blame  or  defense.  Even  in  the  single  camp 
of  his  enemies  or  his  friends,  there  are  two 
factions,  who  allow  either  their  opinion  of  his 
life  to  prescribe  their  approach  to  his  writ 
ings,  or  the  quality  of  his  imagination  to 
color  their  view  of  his  life.  In  Europe,  by 
contrast,  there  has  been  but  one  literary 
opinion  of  Poe.  Criticism  there,  without  ex 
aggerating  his  range,  has  generously  insisted 
upon  his  rare  mood  and  his  finished  art; 
indeed,  to  the  French  or  Russian  reader  he  is 
usually  the  one  American  poet  of  significance. 
And  at  last  the  persuasion  grows  upon  even 
the  most  prejudiced  of  his  countrymen,  that 
if  the  American  temper  to  some  extent  has 
rejected  Poe  and  the  temper  of  Europe  to  a 
large  extent  has  welcomed  him,  the  proper 
inference,  whatever  it  may  be,  is  not  neces 
sarily  to  Poe's  discredit.  The  obligation  upon 
the  critic  is  clear  —  to  understand  Poe  as  he 
is  envisaged  abroad,  and  to  explain  that  in 


86       GREAT  AMERICAN  WRITERS 

him  and  in  his  countrymen  which  has  qualified 
his  fame  at  home. 

They  must  excel  in  the  disposition  to  judge 
their  brother,  who  would  estimate  Poe's  exact 
accountability  for  the  mismanagement  of  his 
life.  He  was  born  in  Boston,  January  19, 
1809.  The  fact  that  his  parents  were  actor 
folk,  playing  unsuccessfully  in  the  city  at 
the  time,  predestined  him  to  no  cordial  ac 
ceptance  by  New  England.  That 'his  father, 
David  Poe,  had  been  cast  off  by  his  very  repu 
table  family  in  Baltimore  when  he  went  on 
the  stage,  was  no  recommendation  to  South 
ern  society.  The  mother,  Elizabeth  Arnold, 
was  herself  the  daughter  of  an  actress,  and 
in  1805,  when  David  Poe  married  her,  she 
was  the  widow  of  another  actor  named  Hop 
kins.  All  these  theatrical  people  were  unsuc 
cessful,  and  David  Poe  married  in  romantic 
improvidence.  After  a  few  years  of  hardship 
he  died,  or  disappeared,  and  at  the  end  of 
1811,  while  acting  in  Richmond,  Mrs.  Poe 
died,  and  Edgar  was  taken  as  a  charity  waif 
into  the  home  of  Mr.  John  Allan,  a  fairly 
well-to-do  Scotch  tobacco  merchant,  whose 
name  he  added  to  his  own. 

That  he  was  a  spoiled  child  in  this  family, 
encouraged  to  exhibit  his  accomplishments 
of  declamation  and  of  drinking  the  health  of 
guests;  that  he  spent  five  years  in  an  English 


EDGAR  ALLAN  POE  87 

school,  where  he  learned  the  use  of  his  fists, 
and  accumulated  impressions  of  old-world 
architecture  and  atmosphere;  that  he  was 
sent  to  the  University  of  Virginia,  where  the 
social  barrier  between  him  and  the  well-born 
Southern  boys  fixed  in  his  nature  that  obses 
sion  of  morbid  and  sensitive  pride  which  he 
makes  almost  a  cardinal  virtue  in  his  stories, 
— these,  with  his  inheritance  of  waywardness, 
are  perhaps  the  controlling  facts  in  his  life. 
When  in  1826  because  of  his  drinking  and 
gambling  Mr.  Allan  took  him  out  of  the  Uni 
versity,  Poe's  character  was  already  shaped. 
The  Scotchman  had  never  understood  his 
protege,  as  he  proved  by  making  the  youth 
a  clerk  in  his  business.  Poe  immediately  ran 
away. 

After  a  short  stay  in  Boston,  where  he  pub 
lished  his  first  volume,  Tamerlane  and  Other 
Poems,  1827,  Poe  enlisted  in  the  army  under 
the  name  of  Edgar  A.  Perry.  In  his  new  way 
of  life  he  succeeded  better  than  might  have 
been  expected,  and  even  earned  promotion, 
but  in  1829  he  was  sufficiently  reconciled  to 
Mr.  Allan  to  profit  by  his  influence  in  ob 
taining  an  honorable  discharge,  whereupon 
he  applied  for  an  appointment  to  West  Point, 
meanwhile  publishing  his  second  volume,  Al 
Aaraaf,  Tamerlane,  and  Minor  Poems,  Balti 
more,  1829.  From  July,  1830,  to  February, 


88       GREAT  AMERICAN  WRITERS 

1831,  he  was  at  the  military  academy,  dislik 
ing  his  duties  more  and  more.  He  procured 
his  dismissal  by  deliberate  insubordination, 
and  began  his  lifework  in  literature,  with 
the  New  York  edition  of  his  Poems,  1831. 

It  was  in  Baltimore  and  with  his  prize- 
story,  however — The  MS.  Found  in  a  Bottle 
— that  Poe's  fame  began,  although  circum 
stances  brought  it  about  that  his  reputation 
should  for  a  time  grow  chiefly  from  editing 
and  reviewing,  rather  than  from  verse  or  fic 
tion.  After  a  few  contributions  to  the  Balti 
more  Saturday  Visitor,  the  magazine  whose 
prize  he  had  won,  he  became  editor  of  the 
Southern  Literary  Messenger,  which  through 
his  guidance,  and  especially  after  his  notable 
review  of  a  novel  by  one  of  the  Knicker 
bocker  school,  in  1835,  became  the  acknowl 
edged  rival  of  the  best  Northern  magazines. 
His  connection  with  this  Richmond  periodi 
cal  coincided  with  the  happiest  period  of  his 
life.  He  is  thought  to  have  married  privately, 
in  1835,  his  cousin  Virginia  Clemm,  whose 
mother,  his  father's  sister,  had  for  some  time 
shared  his  fortunes,  and  as  long  as  he  lived 
was  his  most  helpful  friend.  He  certainly 
married  his  cousin  publicly  in  May,  1836, 
and  his  home  life  was  ideal.  His  advancement 
in  his  profession  seemed  sure.  He  was  reck 
oned  with  as  the  founder  of  a  new  school  of 


EDGAR  ALLAN  POE  89 

severe  and  methodical  criticism,  and  he  was 
demonstrating  his  unusual  editorial  gift  for 
developing  a  magazine.  But  in  the  beginning 
of  1837  his  position  on  the  Messenger  was 
abruptly  vacated,  in  consequence  of  a 
drunken  fit  that  incapacitated  him  for  several 
days.  After  a  brief  but  unhappy  interval  he 
became  editor  of  The  Gentleman's  Magazine, 
of  Philadelphia,  and  demonstrated  again  his 
skill  in  building  up  the  periodical;  but  again 
he  retired  abruptly  after  a  quarrel  with  the 
owner  of  the  magazine,  the  cause  of  which  is 
not  known  but  easily  guessed  at.  He  cer 
tainly  had  opportunities  to  recover  himself 
if  self-control  had  been  possible  for  him.  After 
another  interval  he  began  to  edit  the  new 
Graham9 s  Magazine,  in  which  he  published, 
among  other  things,  The  Murders  in  the  Rue 
Morgue,  and  The  Descent  into  the  Maelstrom. 
His  chief  service  to  the  magazine,  however, 
was  editorial,  and  he  had  his  usual  success; 
the  subscriptions  increased  and  his  reputa 
tion  spread.  But  in  1842  he  drank  himself 
out  of  this  position  also.  He  had  an  excuse 
for  his  weakness  now;  his  young  wife  had 
broken  a  blood-vessel  and  had  sunk  into  that 
desperate  invalidism  from  which  she  was 
never  to  recover,  and  in  his  insanity  over  the 
prospect  of  her  death,  Poe  claimed,  he 
turned  to  drink.  "My  enemies,"  he  said, 


90       GREAT  AMERICAN  WRITERS 

"referred  the  insanity  to  the  drink,  rather 
than  the  drink  to  the  insanity." 

The  incident  practically  closed  his  oppor 
tunities  in  Philadelphia,  though  he  enlisted 
the  support  of  some  patient  friends  in  a 
scheme  for  a  new  magazine,  and  he  encour 
aged  himself  in  the  hope  that  he  might  get  a 
sinecure  position  with  the  Government.  He 
also  began  a  correspondence  with  Lowell, 
to  whose  short-fated  magazine,  The  Pioneer, 
he  contributed.  But  on  a  visit  to  Washing 
ton,  Poe  disposed  of  his  chances  with  the  Gov 
ernment  by  getting  drunk,  and  the  failure  of 
The  Pioneer  perhaps  helped  to  discourage  his 
publishing  scheme.  He  made  a  brief  adven 
ture  in  lecturing,  which  was  successful  but 
not  financially,  and  he  published  his  well- 
known  Black  Cat  in  The  Saturday  Evening 
Post,  then  called  The  United  States  Saturday 
Post.  But  he  could  not  support  himself  by 
such  meagre  performance,  and  in  what  seems 
a  desperate  mood  he  settled  in  New  York, 
in  April,  1844. 

His  arrival  was  signalized  by  the  publica 
tion  of  The  Balloon  Hoax  in  The  Sun9  April  13. 
For  a  time,  however,  he  secured  no  perma 
nent  employment.  In  October,  N.  P.  Willis 
gave  him  a  very  minor  post  on  The  Evening 
Mirror,  a  daily  with  a  weekly  supplement.  In 
this  paper  on  January  29,  1845,  appeared 


EDGAR  ALLAN  POE  91 

The  Raven,  in  comparison  with  the  immediate 
and  permanent  fame  of  which  his  previous 
reputation  is  insignificant.  Willis  recognized 
Poe's  genius  and  remained  his  friend,  but  the 
work  of  a  daily  paper  was  distasteful,  and 
Poe  soon  went  over  to  The  Broadway  Journal, 
a  weekly  managed  by  Charles  F.  Briggs,  a 
friend  of  Lowell's.  Poe's  connection  with  this 
periodical  is  chiefly  remembered  for  his 
fanatical  attacks  upon  Longfellow,  whom 
for  years  he  had  persistently  accused  of  pla 
giarism.  This  unwarranted  animosity  was  a 
heavy  charge  upon  the  patience  of  his  well- 
wishers,  and  when  Lowell,  passing  through 
the  city,  called  upon  him  and  found  him  too 
intoxicated  to  be  seen,  the  inevitable  end  of 
his  career  was  fairly  plain  to  all  reasonably 
skilful  prophets.  The  Broadway  Journal 
suddenly  stopped,  because  Poe,  according 
to  Briggs,  indulged  in  a  drunken  spree,  and 
Briggs  was  unwilling  to  go  on  with  him.  The 
printer  resumed  publication,  however,  with 
Poe  as  editor,  and  in  October  Poe  bought  the 
rights  of  the  journal  from  the  printer  for 
fifty  dollars,  and  for  one  short  space  of  his  life 
attained  his  ambition  to  own  a  periodical. 
But  he  had  absolutely  no  capital;  in  fact, 
he  had  made  his  purchase  with  a  promissory 
note  endorsed  by  Horace  Greeley,  who  later 
had  to  pay  it;  and  after  borrowing  desper- 


92       GREAT  AMERICAN  WRITERS 

ately  from  a  few  friends  open  to  his  appeal, 
Poe  had  to  abandon  his  journal  at  the  end  of 
the  year.  In  October  also,  on  the  16th,  he 
had  made  his  notorious  appearance  at  the 
Boston  Lyceum,  where  he  had  mystified  an 
originally  well-disposed  audience  by  reading 
to  them  his  Al  Aaraaf;  and  in  The  Broadway 
Journal  for  November  1  he  followed  up  this 
strange  performance  by  asserting  that  he  had 
passed  off  a  juvenile  production  upon  the 
Boston  people  because  they  deserved  nothing 
better.  Altogether  the  year  was  most  disas 
trous,  although  it  closed  with  the  publication 
of  The  Raven  and  Other  Poems  in  New  York. 
In  the  beginning  of  1846  Poe  removed  to 
the  cottage  at  Fordham  now  visited  as  the 
chief  shrine  of  his  memory.  There  his  wife's 
long  illness  soon  became  very  serious,  he 
himself  approached  a  condition  of  collapse, 
and  his  poverty  was  extreme.  His  friends 
made  a  public  appeal  on  his  behalf,  which 
wounded  his  pride,  but  he  was  in  no  position 
to  refuse  their  charity.  On  January  30,  1847, 
his  wife  died.  The  remainder  of  his  life  is 
almost  too  pitiable  to  recount.  What  writing 
he  did,  even  his  philosophical  Eureka,  A  Prose 
Poem,  1848,  and  the  oft-declaimed  jingle, 
The  Bells,  is  negligible.  That  his  body  and 
mind  were  shattered  is  the  clear  excuse  for 
the  maudlin  love-making  that  occupied  his 


EDGAR  ALLAN  POE  93 

last  days.  He  wavered  between  an  old  flame 
of  his  Richmond  youth  and  Mrs.  Sarah  Helen 
Whitman,  of  Providence,  and  in  the  end  he 
seems  to  have  engaged  himself  in  succession 
to  both.  They,  as  well  as  his  other  friends, 
apparently  tried  to  encourage  him  and  rescue 
his  genius  from  himself,  but  his  long  suffer 
ings  and  his  excesses  brought  him  to  a  sudden 
death  in  the  Baltimore  City  Hospital,  Octo 
ber  7,  1849. 

A  career  so  unedifying  needs  to  be  outlined 
here  only  to  explain  Poe's  reputation  and 
perhaps  his  work.  His  character  fared  very 
badly  at  the  hands  of  Griswold,  his  first  and 
most  ungenerous  biographer;  and  a  life  like 
his  easily  attracts  to  itself  mythical  but  no 
less  damaging  accretions.  Yet  even  with 
proper  allowance  Poe  was  handicapped  with 
American  readers,  who  naturally  made  their 
approach  to  his  writings  through  the  preju 
dicing  vestibule  of  his  personal  reputation. 
It  would  be  out  of  place  here  to  raise  the 
question  whether  the  American  insistence 
upon  a  clean  life  in  literary  men  is  provin 
cial,  if  not  parochial,  or  whether  it  involves  a 
confusion  of  the  values  of  art;  it  is  enough  to 
recognize  that  this  insistence  has  distinguished 
American  literature  and  shaped  its  reputa 
tions.  Against  the  difference  between  his 
character  and  that  of  Hawthorne,  it  has 


94       GREAT  AMERICAN  WRITERS 

availed  Poe  nothing  that  his  stories  are  in 
subject  more  conventional,  and  raise  less 
moral  questioning,  than  Hawthorne's;  even 
were  his  drunkenness  and  fondness  for  literary 
imposture  all  a  myth,  it  would  still  be  re 
membered  that  he  tried  to  injure  Longfellow 
and  he  deceived  Lowell.  It  may  be  that  fu 
ture  disclosures  will  render  him  on  the  per 
sonal  side  a  less  discreditable  figure. 

Foreign  readers,  by  contrast,  have  allowed 
Poe's  stories  and  poems  to  plead  for  them 
selves,  and  have  attended  to  his  life  as  a 
secondary  matter.  This  attitude  seems  at 
once  more  just  and  kind,  and  it  gives  most 
illumination.  It  permits  us  to  see  in  all  of 
his  best  work  an  intellectual  grip  on  the  de 
tails  of  expression — what  is  called  technic — 
and  on  the  direction  of  the  theme  as  a  whole 
— what  is  called  form — such  as  no  other 
Anglo-Saxon  writer  has  so  habitually  dis 
played.  If  his  conscious  art  seems  less  re 
markable  now,  when  the  short  story  and  the 
short  poem  at  the  hand  of  an  army  of  devo 
tees  have  been  polished  and  finished  to  a 
point  of  exhausted  interest,  it  must  be  re 
membered  that  in  such  matters  Poe  largely 
showed  the  way,  and  even  prophesied  that  his 
methods,  faithfully  pursued,  would  lead  to 
this  wide-spread  mastery  of  his  craft.  It  is 
the  craftsmen  that  we  see  in  him  first;  it 


EDGAR  ALLAN  PQE  95 

is  the  craftsman's  creed  that  he  formulates 
in  the  Philosophy  of  Composition — a  creed  no 
less  valid  because  the  particular  account  of 
the  composition  of  The  Raven  may  not  be 
true.  It  should  be  added,  for  greater  light  on 
his  fame,  that  craftsmanship  is  the  part  of 
literature  most  easily  taught  and  by  the 
mediocre  most  readily  apprehended. 

This  very  appeal  to  the  sense  of  technic  has 
undoubtedly  deprived  Poe  of  some  just  recog 
nition  in  America,  where  the  faith  in  the  im 
mediate  inspiration  of  art  has  been  somewhat 
exclusively  held.  Foreign  readers,  however, 
have  observed  that  intellect  in  his  work  counts 
for  far  more  than  technic.  The  very  subject- 
matter  of  his  stories,  for  example,  and  the 
very  mood  that  prompts  them,  are  in  essence 
intellectual.  To  say  that  his  first  writings 
suggest  an  imaginative  flight  in  mathematics, 
would  be  apt  analogy,  provided  that  the 
reader  sees  in  mathematics  something  more 
than  arithmetic.  The  mathematician  steadily 
contemplates  an  eternity  of  order,  to  which 
temporal  happenings  are  to  be  referred.  To 
the  mind  that  can  perceive  the  eternal  order, 
all  motley  processions  of  events  and  hap 
hazard  multitudes  of  phenomena  yield  up 
the  secret  of  their  design,  and  can  be  re 
arranged  to  illustrate  it.  The  delight  of  dis 
covering  in  the  apparently  accidental  world 


96       GREAT  AMERICAN  WRITERS 

about  us  the  analogue  of  the  eternal  order  in 
our  minds,  is  the  greatest — and  in  some  form 
or  other  the  commonest — of  human  lures. 
It  is  the  motive  alike  of  the  scientist  recon 
structing  Behemoth  from  a  fossil  tooth,  and 
of  the  child  solving  a  jig-saw  puzzle.  To  per 
ceive  in  life  what  the  mind  recognizes  as  order 
is,  of  course,  the  function  of  literature  as  well 
as  of  mathematics.  But  the  poet  loves  human 
phenomena  as  well  as  the  truth  to  be  seen 
through  them;  his  affection  tries  to  make 
them  eternal,  as  well  as  the  truth;  whereas 
the  mathematician  gladly  exchanges  life  for 
symbols,  if  thereby  he  can  more  clearly 
demonstrate  what  life  has  taught  him.  In 
practically  all  his  stories  Poe,  like  a  mathema 
tician,  makes  a  demonstration,  and  in  order 
to  prove  his  theorem  with  the  absoluteness 
that  mathematics  rather  than  literature  re 
quires,  he  deals  not  with  characters  but  with 
symbols. 

The  illustrations  are  easy  to  find.  Few  of 
the  tales  have  their  suggestion  from  obser 
vation — what  is  ordinarily  called  experience; 
they  usually  start  from  speculation  induced 
by  reading,  and  the  speculation  or  the  passage 
that  suggested  it  is  announced  first,  like  a 
proposition  to  be  proved.  Morella,  the  study 
of  persistent  identity,  has  a  motto  from  Plato, 
"Itself,  by  itself,  one  everlastingly,  and 


EDGAR  ALLAN  POE  97 

single";  and  the  tale  shows  us  how  a  dying 
mother,  by  abnormal  exercise  of  the  will, 
took  possession  of  the  new-born  daughter,  so 
that  they  were  identical.  Ligeia,  the  best 
example,  starting  from  a  saying  of  Joseph 
Glanville's,  that  "Man  doth  not  yield  him 
self  to  the  angels,  nor  unto  death  utterly, 
save  only  through  the  weakness  of  his  feeble 
will,"  demonstrates  how  the  soul  of  a  pas 
sionate  woman  long  dead  returned  to  her 
husband's  side  by  appropriating  the  dying 
body  of  his  second  wife,  even  changing  it 
back  to  her  own  appearance.  There  is  no 
need  to  point  out  that  the  characters  in  these 
stories  are  symbols,  or  that  the  events  are 
shaped  to  effect  a  kind  of  proof.  Even  in  the 
tales  that  seem  different,  there  is  no  other 
method.  In  The  Masque  of  the  Red  Death, 
where  the  design  to  be  elucidated  is  one  of 
color,  the  theme  to  be  proved  is  stated  in  the 
early  description  of  the  pestilence:  "Blood 
was  its  avatar  and  its  seal — the  redness  and 
the  horror  of  blood."  In  The  Cask  of  Amon 
tillado,  which  demonstrates  a  theory  of  re 
venge,  the  theory  is  first  advanced:  "A 
wrong  is  unredressed  when  retribution  over 
takes  its  redresser.  It  is  equally  unredressed 
when  the  avenger  fails  to  make  himself  felt 
as  such  to  him  who  has  done  wrong."  No  less 
clear  is  the  method  of  imaginative  demon- 


98       GREAT  AMERICAN  WRITERS 

stration  in  the  pseudo-scientific  tales,  like 
The  MS.  Found  in  a  Bottle,  or  The  Descent 
into  the  Maelstrom,  or  Hans  Pfall;  and  the 
method  is  even  more  palpable  in  the  tales  of 
ratiocination,  such  as  The  Murders  in  the 
Rue  Morgue. 

Poe  was  conscious  of  the  kinship  of  his 
art  to  mathematics,  and  he  well  knew  that  it 
would  produce  a  powerful  effect  of  inevita 
bility.  He  tells  us  in  The  Philosophy  of  Com 
position  how  he  wrote:  "I  prefer  commenc 
ing  with  the  consideration  of  an  effect.  .  .  . 
Having  chosen  a  novel,  first,  and  secondly  a 
vivid  effect,  I  consider  whether  it  can  be  best 
wrought  by  incident  or  tone — whether  by 
ordinary  incidents  and  peculiar  tone,  or  the 
converse,  or  by  peculiarity  both  of  incident 
and  tone — afterward  looking  about  me  (or 
rather  with'::)  for  such  combinations  of  event, 
or  tone,  as  shall  best  aid  me  in  the  construc 
tion  of  the  effect."  And  later,  speaking  of 
The  Raven,  he  says,  "It  is  my  design  to  render 
it  manifest  that  no  one  point  in  its  composi 
tion  is  referable  either  to  accident  or  intu 
ition;  that  the  work  proceeded,  step  by  step, 
to  its  completion  with  the  precision  and  rigid 
consequence  of  a  mathematical  problem." 
Where  every  step  proceeds  with  this  precision 
and  consequence,  a  story  must  have  that  in 
evitability  which  is  the  secret  of  literary 


EDGAR  ALLAN  POE  99 

form — that  fatedness  which  has  chiefly  fas 
cinated  the  genius  of  Greece  and  of  France — 
nations  that,  significantly,  have  been  devoted 
also  to  mathematics.  In  Poe  this  inevita 
bility  of  form  perhaps  encouraged  a  prefer 
ence  for  subjects  in  which  fate  could  be  ex 
ploited;  and  in  his  themes  of  doom  he  appeals 
to  the  French,  as  he  would  have  appealed  to 
the  Greeks. 

The  obvious  criticism  of  all  this  method  is 
that  Poe  has  little  interest  in  life  as  it  is,  and 
remains  aloof  from  common  human  affairs. 
He  chiefly  looked  within  himself,  as  he  has 
just  told  us,  for  his  facts.  With  few  excep 
tions  his  stories  do  not  proceed  through  con 
versation,  nor  through  any  other  exhibition 
of  reality;  his  business  was  not  to  see  the 
real,  but  to  make  us  see  the  fanciful  as  if  it 
were  real,  in  order  to  prove  his  point.  His 
persons  are  phantom  symbols;  he  does  not 
know  them,  nor  do  we;  who  is  Usher,  apart 
from  his  disease?  or  Dupin,  apart  from  his 
skill?  Yet  these  objections  to  Poe's  method 
are  best  made  when  we  have  not  recently  read 
him.  The  fact  is,  if  each  story  begins  by  ap 
pealing  to  the  mind,  it  ends  by  taking  hold  of 
the  soul.  In  the  process  of  reading  we  cannot 
escape  a  profound  emotional  experience — 
that  effect  which  Poe  said  was  his  first  inten 
tion.  When  we  analyse  them,  the  elements 


100      GREAT  AMERICAN  WRITERS 

of  his  skill  are  rigid  and  cold  as  the  type  on 
the  page;  the  story,  however,  is  not  on  the 
page  but  in  us.  In  other  words,  it  is  a  mis 
take  not  to  distinguish  between  the  intellec 
tual  process  of  the  demonstration  and  the 
emotional  effect  of  it.  Intellectually  The 
Murders  in  the  Rue  Morgue  exploits  the  ratio- 
cinative  method;  as  a  work  of  art  it  takes 
hold  of  us  with  the  horror  of  the  incident  and 
the  scene.  Intellectually  The  Descent  into  the 
Maelstrom  expounds  the  principles  of  physics 
which  saved  the  fisherman  from  the  whirl 
pool;  the  effect  of  the  story  is  the  profound 
terror  of  the  predicament.  To  say,  there 
fore,  that  Poe's  art  remains  aloof  from  expe 
rience,  is  to  forget  that  it  always  lays  its 
finger  on  some  sensitive  nerve  of  the  reader's 
spirit. 

Moreover,  Poe  does  give  us  a  remarkable 
disclosure  of  life  in  the  revelation  of  his  own 
nature.  Perhaps  it  would  be  better  for  his 
fame,  though  hardly  for  his  morbid  charm, 
if  this  were  not  so.  All  his  great  stories  ex 
hibit  some  triumph  or  attitude  of  the  mind, 
yet  their  effect  is  one  of  horror.  That  his 
psychological  interest  and  the  practice  of  his 
own  intellect  led  Poe  to  the  creation  of  hor 
ror,  is  the  chief  index  of  something  fearsome, 
something  demon-like  in  him.  To  that  age 
and  that  land  that  has  habitually  dreamt  of 


EDGAR  ALLAN  POE  101 

the  beneficence  of  science,  Poe  was  the 
prophet  of  science  as  a  Frankenstein,  and  of 
all  horizons  of  the  mind  as  so  many  possible 
avenues  to  hell.  Little  wonder  that  his 
countrymen  found  in  this  function  of  his 
genius  something  malign;  less  wonder  per 
haps  that  they  have  held  to  their  first  opinion, 
seeing  what  manner  of  person  he  draws  to 
him  from  abroad,  beginning  with  his  French 
sponsor,  Baudelaire.  Of  the  moral  conven 
tions  of  his  times  Poe  was  never  a  foe,  and  his 
writings  are,  in  a  quiescent  way,  the  very 
strongholds  of  propriety;  unlike  the  New 
England  Puritans,  he  is  so  sure  of  the  validity 
of  the  Ten  Commandments  that  he  always 
assumes  it  without  discussion.  But  in  a 
deeper  sense  he  shakes  our  faith  in  life;  crime 
he  everywhere  discovers,  but  ignores  its 
moral  aspects  as  sin;  worst  of  all,  he  is  sus 
picious  of  life,  of  the  mind,  as  of  something 
that  may  at  any  moment  betray  the  soul. 

The  other  less  fundamental  ways  in  which 
Poe  has  written  his  own  portrait  can  only  be 
enumerated  here.  So  often  his  theme  is  the 
power  of  the  will  to  surmount  obstacles,  that 
even  the  least  subtle  reader  is  aware  of  Poe's 
brooding  on  his  own  weakness,  and  of  the  ideal 
strength  he  set  before  himself.  His  hero,  too, 
like  himself,  seems  dedicated  to  some  strange 
fate,  and  is  a  solitary  spirit.  He  is  almost 


102     GREAT  AMERICAN  WRITERS 

as  prophetic  of  his  doom  as  Shelley  was. 
He  often  reverts  to  the  lover  who  after  his 
bride's  death  forgets  her  and  marries  again; 
whether  the  outcome  is  happy,  as  in  Eleonora, 
or  weird,  as  in  Ligeia,  there  is  a  troubled  em 
phasis  upon  the  sin  of  disloyalty.  More 
obvious  studies  of  his  worse  self  are  found  in 
William  Wilson  and  The  Imp  of  the  Perverse. 
Criticism  has  also  stressed  the  autobiography 
in  the  low  physical  tone  to  which  so  many  of 
the  stories  are  keyed — the  atmosphere  of  dis 
ease  and  invalidism  and  epileptic  seizure, — 
and  for  a  brighter  record,  the  tenacious  wor 
ship  of  an  ideal  beauty  even  in  the  most 
pathetic  discouragements. 

Poe's  critical  principles  have  been  implied 
in  what  has  here  been  said  of  his  stories,  for 
his  theory  is  for  the  most  part  a  very  subtle 
analysis  of  his  own  practice.  The  end  of 
poetry,  he  taught,  is  to  express  the  yearning 
for  the  beautiful — the  desire  not  of  the 
beauty  we  see,  but  of  the  beauty  we  dream. 
Therefore  poetry — and  he  meant  the  term 
to  include  all  great  art — is  necessarily  freed 
from  any  obligation  to  fact;  the  poet  may 
change  the  occurrences  of  life  as  he  pleases, 
in  order  to  reproduce  the  ideal.  "We  strug 
gle  by  multiform  combinations  among  the 
things  and  thoughts  of  Time  to  attain  a  por 
tion  of  that  Loveliness  whose  very  elements, 


EDGAR  ALLAN  POE  103 

perhaps,  appertain  to  Eternity  alone."  The 
purpose  of  this  combination  and  rearrange 
ment  is  to  show  "a  harmony  where  none  was 
apparent  before,"  to  make  that  demonstra 
tion  of  the  eternal  order,  which  we  noticed 
in  the  stories.  The  function  of  the  intellect, 
as  far  as  poetry  is  concerned,  is  to  manage 
this  demonstration;  the  resulting  effect  of 
the  whole,  however,  is  emotional.  The  eter 
nal  order  may  also  be  conceived  as  truth  or 
goodness,  but  not  primarily  so  in  poetry;  the 
poet,  having  pursued  the  eternal  order  with 
passionate  emotion,  sees  it  not  as  truth  but  as 
beauty.  Therefore — and  this  still  is  to  many 
Anglo-Saxons  a  stumbling-block — beauty  is 
more  to  the  poet  than  morals  or  duty  or 
conscience  or  truth;  beauty  includes  these 
others,  but  it  alone  should  be  the  immediate 
goal.  Even  truth,  for  the  poet,  is  valuable 
chiefly  as  a  means  of  approach  to  the -eternal 
order;  the  order  itself  is  beauty.  Poe  sums 
his  theory  in  one  sentence,  "And  in  regard 
to  Truth — if,  to  be  sure,  through  the  attain 
ment  of  a  truth  we  are  led  to  perceive  a  har 
mony  where  none  was  apparent  before,  we 
experience  at  once  the  true  poetical  effect; 
but  this  effect  is  referable  to  the  harmony 
alone,  and  not  in  the  least  degree  to  the  truth 
which  merely  served  to  render  the  harmony 
manifest."  And  the  poet  differs  from  the 


104      GREAT  AMERICAN  WRITERS 

prose  artist  only  in  that  his  province  is  the 
rhythmical  creation  of  beauty. 

In  stating  this  theory  Poe  developed  a 
secondary  theory,  which  has  usually  had 
a  larger  share  of  attention.  The  effect  of  a 
poem  is  to  excite,  by  elevating  the  soul.  All 
excitement  is,  of  necessity,  transient.  When 
the  excitement  dies,  the  elevation  of  soul 
ends — and  so  does  the  poem,  in  so  far  as  it 
is  a  poem.  Therefore  a  long  poem  does  not 
exist;  the  epics  are  simply  a  collection  of 
different  excitements,  different  poems.  On 
the  other  hand,  some  poems  are  too  short, 
because  they  end  before  the  excitement  has 
run  its  course.  The  perfect  poem  has  an  ab 
solute  unity  of  form,  in  that  it  conveys  a 
single  excitement  as  the  excitement  occurs, 
without  expansion  or  compression. 

The  essay  or  lecture,  The  Poetic  Principle 
in  which  his  theory  is  set  forth,  marks  the 
serious  beginning  of  literary  criticism  in  the 
United  States.  It  remains  the  most  impor 
tant  of  American  contributions  to  critical 
theory.  Though  its  ideas  are  familiar  enough 
now  to  the  professed  student  of  literature, 
they  are  still  at  variance  with  the  common 
practice  of  American  poets,  and  of  all  but  the 
best  English  poets;  and  some  readers  still 
resent  that  he  should  find  fault  with  Long 
fellow  for  didacticism.  In  another  essay,  The 


EDGAR  ALLAN  POE  105 

Philosophy  of  Composition,  he  advances  the 
not  very  startling  paradox  that  all  stories  and 
poems  must  be  written  backwards.  The 
main  interest  of  the  essay  lies  in  the  brilliant 
account  of  the  writing  of  The  Raven.  Prob 
ably  few  people  believe  that  the  process  was 
as  Poe  tells  us;  perhaps  he  had  convinced 
himself  that  it  was.  But  if  the  account  may 
not  be  true  of  the  method  of  the  poem,  it  is  a 
remarkable  analysis  of  the  poem's  effect. 
A  third  essay,  on  The  Rationale  of  Verse, 
makes  some  pedantic  display  of  Poe's  ideas 
of  meter,  and  also  shows  an  admirable  grasp 
of  the  difference  between  classical  quantita 
tive  verse  and  English  stress  verse.  These 
three  essays  constitute  Poe's  achievement  in 
critical  theory,  and  his  just  fame  as  a  critic 
largely  rests  on  them.  But  his  immediate 
reputation  rested  on  his  particular  criticisms, 
— on  his  reviews  of  Longfellow  and  Haw 
thorne  and  lesser  Americans,  on  his  clever 
prophecy  of  the  plot  of  Barnaby  Rudge,  and 
his  later  analysis  of  the  book,  and  on  his  early 
recognition  of  Tennyson  and  Mrs.  Browning 
and  others  not  then  arrived  at  fame.  Even  in 
his  least  pleasant  reviews,  where  his  irritability 
and  almost  insane  prejudices  make  the  read 
ing  unbearably  bitter,  his  acuteness  of  ob 
servation  is  extraordinary.  As  in  the  case  of 
his  master  Coleridge,  his  literary  intuitions 


106     GREAT  AMERICAN  WRITERS 

are  always  fine,  whatever  may  be  thought  of 
the  reasoning  by  which  he  supports  them 

One  criticism  of  Poe's  poetic  practice  is 
suggested  by  his  poetic  theory.  The  worth 
of  any  poem  must  depend,  not  upon  the 
truth  incidentally  treated — for  by  definition 
Poe  is  not  concerned  with  the  incidental 
truth — but  upon  the  total  effect  of  truth, 
which  is  beauty.  Safe  as  this  formula  is  for 
the  analysis  of  a  poem  of  which  the  effect 
is  unquestioned,  it  contains  no  certain  recipe 
for  getting  the  effect.  The  most  didactic 
rhymster  has  this  advantage  over  Poe,  that  he 
can  be  understood  even  by  the  imaginative 
who  despise  him,  whereas  Poe,  if  his  reader 
through  lack  of  sympathy  or  imagination 
misses  the  effect,  often  seems  to  say  nothing 
at  all.  Hence  there  are  two  very  different 
attitudes  toward  his  poetry,  and  most  of  his 
readers  by  change  of  mood  have  gone  over 
from  one  side  to  the  other. 

A  few  poems,  however,  have  been  so  sure 
and  so  permanent  in  their  effect  that  Poe  is 
not  likely  to  rank  second  to  any  other  Ameri 
can  poet,  even  the  most  voluminous.  An 
improvement  of  literary  taste  in  the  reader 
may  indeed  make  Poe's  domain  seem  nar 
rower,  but  it  will  also  establish  him  more 
firmly  in  his  range,  and  the  poems  that  miss 
their  effect  will  be  fewer.  Those  that  seem 


EDGAR  ALLAN  POE  107 

now  most  secure  of  their  fame  are  Israfel 
and  the  shorter  poem  To  Helen.  The  effect, 
rather  than  the  idea,  of  both  is  that  poignant 
yearning  after  the  ideal  which  is  the  essence  of 
poetry.  Poe  wrote  nothing  more  ethereal, 
more  vibrant,  more  inevitable  in  form  than 
Israfel;  it  is  also  the  most  manly  in  tone  of 
all  his  poems,  and  is  often  considered  the 
finest.  To  Helen,  known  by  its  two  much- 
quoted  lines,  is  more  artificial,  less  soaring, 
and  less  confiding  of  his  character.  A  little 
below  these  two,  because  of  a  certain  un- 
evenness,  are  To  One  in  Paradise,  with  its 
splendid  cadence,  and  The  Haunted  Palace, 
memorable  for  the  eerie  music  of  its  second 
stanza. 

Eulalie,  Ulalume,  and  Annabel  Lee  have 
been  much  associated  with  The  Bells  as  sub 
jects  of  parody,  but  they  differ  from  the  well- 
known  sound-poem  in  being  far  more  than  an 
opportunity  for  the  elocutionist.  They  ex 
press  that  passionate  sorrow  for  a  dead  woman 
which  was  a  prophetic  theme  in  all  Poe's  work. 
This  strange  obsession  has  been  referred  to 
the  premature  death  in  his  boyhood  of  a 
woman  who  had  befriended  him.  At  all 
events,  Poe's  mind  strangely  occupied  itself 
from  his  youth — as  Rossetti's  did — with  this 
state  of  bereavement  which  he  later  signally 
realized. 


108      GREAT  AMERICAN  WRITERS 

In  this  theme,  indeed,  the  lives  of  Rossetti 
and  Poe  cross,  for  The  Blessed  Damozel,  as 
Hall  Caine  tells  us,  was  suggested  by  The 
Raven.  Rossetti  saw  that  Poe  had  done  the 
utmost  with  the  grief  of  the  lover  on  earth, 
and  determined  to  reverse  the  situation  and 
describe  the  grief  of  the  lover  in  heaven.  To 
some  readers  this  fortunate  suggestion  will 
seem  the  chief  merit  of  The  Raven:  to  the 
imaginative  and  sympathetic,  however,  Poe's 
best  known  poem  will  seem  what  it  really  is, 
one  of  the  most  original  of  human  records  of 
despair. 

CHAPTER  VI 

THE   TRANSCENDENTALISTS 

THE  Transcendent alist  movement  in  New 
England  must  be  studied  as  an  attitude  in 
individuals,  rather  than  as  a  philosophical 
creed.  Hardly  any  two  Transcendentalists 
believed  exactly  the  same  doctrines,  or 
brought  their  arguments  from  the  same 
source.  The  movement  seems  to  have  been 
a  natural  emancipation  from  a  worn  out 
theology;  Puritanism  in  Massachusetts  had 
run  its  course;  that  the  religious  genius  of 
the  serious  community  should  seek  a  new 
development,  was  natural  enough. 

The  ease  with  which  the  change  arrived 


THE  TRANSCENDENTALISTS       109 

indicates  probably  that  its  significance  was 
not  realized.  Some  devout  persons  shared 
the  new  ideas  without  feeling  any  need  to 
abandon  their  old  theological  ground;  such 
a  person  in  particular  was  the  great  Dr. 
William  Ellery  Channing  (1780-1842),  whose 
pulpit  had  a  wider  influence  in  New  England 
than  Emerson's  lecture  platform.  Almost 
all  the  Transcendentalists  took  with  them, 
even  when  they  left  their  old  religion,  the 
mood  of  that  religion,  without  any  apparent 
thought  of  incongruity.  This  quietness  of 
manner  excites  some  admiration.  But  the 
incongruity  between  the  old  mood  and  the 
new  ideas  of  Transcendentalism  suggests  also 
at  times  a  somewhat  amusing  immaturity, 
and  people  with  a  strong  sense  of  humor  do 
not  always  find  it  easy  to  take  Emerson  or 
Margaret  Fuller  or  Alcott  as  seriously  as 
they  deserve.  The  weakness  of  the  Tran 
scendentalists  in  this  respect  is  more  appar 
ent  when  they  are  brought  into  contrast  with 
European  characters,  whose  vision  was 
naturally  broader. 

The  truth  is  that  Transcendentalism  in 
New  England  was  a  parochial  manifesta 
tion.  It  made  its  way  in  communities  so 
much  less  than  provincial  that  they  still 
thought  in  terms  of  the  parish,  and  even 
insisted  on  the  dignity  of  the  parish  in  human 


110     GREAT  AMERICAN  WRITERS 

thought.  It  is  no  doubt  true  that  human 
nature  in  Concord  would  be  much  like 
human  nature  in  Athens,  yet  there  is  a  differ 
ence  between  the  Transcendentalist  attitude 
which  vigorously  asserted  the  equality  of 
Concord,  and  the  equanimity  of  Socrates 
which  assumed  Athens  without  discussion. 
The  Athenian,  living  in  the  best  world  he 
knew,  did  not  think  to  defend  it;  the  Tran 
scendentalist,  realizing  larger  and  older 
civilizations  beyond  the  village  borders,  yet 
set  up  the  village  by  way  of  challenge  to  the 
world.  To  recognize  this  at  the  outset  need 
not  diminish  any  true  admiration  for  Emer 
son's  greatness  or  Thoreau's,  and  the  admis 
sion  will  perhaps  prepare  for  an  explanation 
of  the  Transcendental  incongruities  of  religion 
and  philosophy. 

The  chief  of  the  Transcendentalists  was 
Ralph  Waldo  Emerson,  born  in  Boston, 
May  25,  1803.  His  father,  William  Emerson, 
was  a  distinguished  clergyman  in  the  city, 
as  his  grandfather  also  had  been  in  Concord. 
By  all  the  family  traditions  he  was  dedicated 
to  the  pulpit  from  his  birth.  At  his  father's 
early  death  the  care  of  the  family  fell  upon 
the  mother  and  Miss  Mary  Emerson,  that 
famous  aunt  of  whom  later  Emerson  wrote 
lovingly.  Some  encouragement  came  also 
from  Dr.  Ezra  Ripley,  minister  of  Concord, 


THE  TRANSCENDENTALISTS      111 

who  had  married  the  widow  of  the  grand 
father  Emerson.  But  for  the  most  part  the 
children  had  to  know  poverty,  even  to  the 
extent  of  suffering  jeers  from  other  boys  for 
their  lack  of  proper  clothing. 

William  Emerson,  the  eldest  son,  was  grad 
uated  from  Harvard  in  1818,  and  started  a 
young  ladies'  school  in  Boston  in  order  to  pay 
for  the  education  of  Ralph  Waldo,  who  had  en 
tered  Harvard  in  1817.  The  younger  brother 
helped  in  his  own  support  by  various  work  in 
college,  and  when  the  menial  nature  of  his 
service — waiting  on  table,  for  example — hu 
miliated  him,  Miss  Mary  Emerson  preached 
to  him  a  truer  kind  of  pride.  Doubtless 
this  discipline  was  a  large  part  of  his  bene 
fit  from  college,  for  he  was  not  a  distinguished 
scholar.  When  he  left  Cambridge  he  took 
charge  for  a  while  of  his  brother's  school, 
in  order  to  permit  William  to  continue  his 
studies  for  the  ministry.  This  pedagogical 
experience  taught  Ralph  how  awkward  he 
was,  how  out  of  sympathy  with  the  conven 
tional  society  represented  by  his  girl  pupils. 
*He  was  glad  to  close  the  school  in  1825,  and 
begin  his  residence  as  a  divinity  student  at 
Cambridge.  He  had  worn  himself  out,  how 
ever,  with  too  confined  application,  and  he 
was  obliged  to  spend  some  time  on  a  farm,  to 
recover  his  health.  Then  he  did  some  teach- 


GREAT  AMERICAN  WRITERS 

ing  for  a  while  to  lay  up  money  for  further 
study,  and  in  the  beginning  of  1826  he  took 
the  place  of  his  brother  Edward,  who  had 
been  conducting  a  school  at  Roxbury,  and 
who  at  this  time  also  broke  down.  With  all 
these  distractions  Emerson  saw  but  little  of 
the  Divinity  School,  but  his  general  reading 
and  his  high  character  seem  to  have  satisfied 
the  authorities,  and  in  October,  1826,  he 
was  "approbated  to  preach"  by  the  Middle 
sex  Association  of  Ministers.  Because  his 
eyes  were  very  weak,  he  was  excused  from 
examination. 

For  a  time  there  seemed  little  chance  that 
he  could  undertake  active  work.  So  desper 
ate  was  his  physical  condition  that  he  was 
sent  south  for  the  winter,  and  when  he  re 
turned  the  following  spring  he  was  unable 
to  do  more  than  occasional  preaching.  Mean 
while  several  events  in  the  family  added  to 
his  personal  discouragements.  His  older 
brother,  William,  intended  for  the  ministry, 
had  outgrown  his  orthodox  faith,  as  Emerson 
was  later  destined  to  do,  and  had  disap 
pointed  the  family  by  turning  to  the  law. 
Although  Edward's  health  had  been  regained, 
it  was  likely  at  any  moment  to  be  lost  again, 
so  ambitious  was  he  in  his  studies.  In  1828  he 
went  insane;  and  though  he  recovered  his 
reason,  his  prospects  were  ruined.  Of  these 


THE  TRANSCENDENTALISTS      113 

spiritual  and  physical  upsets,  Emerson  real 
ized  that  he  as  well  as  his  brothers  might  be 
in  danger,  but  something  of  his  bright  philos 
ophy  already  aided  him;  he  managed  to 
make  headway  against  ill  health,  and  even 
had  the  courage  to  engage  himself,  in  Decem 
ber,  1828,  to  Miss  Ellen  Louise  Tucker,  her 
self  an  invalid.  In  the  following  March 
he  was  ordained  associate  pastor  with  the 
Rev.  Henry  Ware,  of  the  Old  North  Church 
in  Boston,  and  on  September  30  he  was 
married.  Dr.  Ware  shortly  afterward  left 
him  in  sole  charge  of  the  parish. 

During  the  three  years  that  Emerson  held 
his  pastorate  his  character  was  developed  and 
fixed  in  its  final  molds.  It  would  seem  to 
be  in  keeping  with  the  sunniness  of  his  dis 
position  and  his  philosophy  that  this  de 
velopment  came  not  from  the  discipline  of 
adversity  but  from  his  own  conscience.  Some 
lucky  fate  had  allowed  him  to  go  thus  far 
in  his  ministerial  life  without  a  single  chal 
lenge;  he  had  even  escaped  the  ordinary 
examinations  when  he  was  allowed  to  preach. 
But  now  that  the  care  of  souls  was  fully  upon 
him,  he  began  to  question  his  own  position. 
It  is  significant  of  the  gradual  break-up  of 
orthodoxy  in  New  England,  that  his  congre 
gation  patiently  suffered  his  more  and  more 
radical  sermons,  and  the  younger  people 


114     GREAT  AMERICAN  WRITERS 

even  delighted  in  them,  although  some  of 
the  older  folk  began  to  feel  uneasy.  At 
last  he  decided  to  lay  his  scruples  frankly 
before  his  congregation,  and  in  June,  1832, 
he  proposed  that  the  church  thereafter  cele 
brate  the  sacrament  without  the  elements. 
His  congregation  did  not  agree  to  the  plan, 
and  he  felt  bound  to  resign.  Between  him 
and  his  associate,  Dr.  Ware,  and  all  of  the 
parish,  there  continued  to  be  friendship  and 
good-feeling,  and  the  congregation  were 
sorry  to  have  him  go.  Once  later  he  almost 
undertook  regular  parish  work,  but  the 
engagement  became  impossible  when  he 
stipulated  that  he  should  say  prayers  in  the 
church  only  when  he  was  in  the  mood. 

His  sorrow  at  leaving  his  church,  almost 
his  profession,  was  lost  at  the  time  in  his 
greater  grief  for  his  wife,  who  had  died 
February  8,  1831.  To  recover  himself  he 
made  his  first  trip  abroad,  and  saw  Landor, 
Coleridge,  Wordsworth,  and  above  all,  Car- 
lyle,  whom  he  visited  at  Craigenputtock. 
On  his  return  to  Boston  in  October,  1833, 
he  lived  with  his  mother,  preached  occa 
sional  sermons,  and  supported  himself  by 
lecturing.  From  1834  to  1835  he  and  his 
mother  lived  with  Dr.  Ezra  Ripley  at  the 
Old  Manse,  his  grandfather  Emerson's  house, 
which  Hawthorne  later  occupied.  On  Sep- 


THE  TRANSCENDENTALISTS      115 

tember  14,  1835,  he  married  Miss  Lydia 
Jackson,  of  Plymouth,  and  removed  to  the 
home  he  had  bought  for  himself  in  Concord. 
With  his  new  start  in  life  came  new  sorrows, 
in  the  deaths  of  his  brilliant  younger  brothers, 
— Edward  dying  in  Porto  Rico,  and  Charles, 
of  quick  consumption,  in  New  York.  Though 
he  was  living  in  his  boyhood  scenes,  Emerson 
had  been  cut  loose  from  his  past,  and  was 
ready  to  appear  in  a  new  character. 

In  1836  he  published  his  first  book,  Nature, 
upon  which  he  had  for  some  years  been 
writing.  In  this  little  volume,  half  essay  in 
spirit,  half  poem,  can  be  found  the  germs 
of  his  later  thinking,  and  even  in  his  solider 
work  he  never  again  made  so  imaginative 
an  appeal.  He  writes  of  the  uses  of  nature, 
considering  the  universe  as  commodity,  as 
beauty,  as  language;  but  his  real  theme  is 
the  independence  and  unity  of  man.  It  is 
our  habit,  he  says,  to  look  too  much  to  the 
past.  Our  humble  desire  to  learn  leads  to  an 
unprofitable  retrospection,  to  mere  building 
sepulchres  of  the  fathers.  The  past  cannot 
aid  us,  because  we  inherit  its  error  as  well  as 
its  progress.  The  answer  to  our  problems  lies 
rather  in  our  present  selves.  "Everyman's 
condition  is  a  solution  in  hieroglyphics  to 
those  inquiries  he  would  put."  This  faith 
in  the  total  equipment  of  the  individual  is  the 


116      GREAT  AMERICAN  WRITERS 

basis  of  Emerson's  doctrine  of  the  Over-Soul, 
the  divine  in  man. 

To  be  free  of  the  past,  however,  Emerson 
found  that  man  must  go  into  solitude,  for 
society  is  the  authentic  representative  of 
the  past.  Solitude,  or  that  kind  of  society 
which  is  most  like  solitude,  is  the  condition 
of  the  soul's  freedom  to  question  and  answer 
itself.  To  Emerson  society  was  full  of  what 
Carlyle  called  "old  clothes,"  but  the  Ameri 
can  would  hardly  allow  that  there  was  any 
thing  else  in  it;  where  Carlyle  would  reform 
it,  he  would  leave  it.  Nor  would  Emerson 
fear  lest  nature,  apart  from  society,  should 
be  inadequate  to  man's  wants;  nature  is 
the  greatest  of  commodities,  and  her  bounty 
is  a  perpetual  rebuke  to  that  mismanagement 
by  which  society  contrives  to  achieve  pov 
erty.  Man's  useful  arts  are  all  mere  accel 
erations  of  nature.  If  we  can  judge  by  his 
manner,  Emerson  here  contemplates  civili 
zation  not  as  a  moral  end  or  as  a  victory  over 
barbarism,  but  as  a  final  harmony  with  nature. 

In  the  realms  of  the  mind  and  the  soul 
nature  promises  to  be  as  all-sufficient  as  in 
the  physical  sphere.  The  eye  is  the  first 
artist,  the  sunlight  is  the  first  painter.  From 
them  we  learn  the  inner  divine  presence  of 
beauty  and  the  intellectual  laws  of  esthetics. 
The  phenomena  of  matter  turn  themselves 


THE  TRANSCENDENTALISTS      117 

into  language  for  man  to  think  and  speak 
with,  and  the  world  lends  itself  to  be  a 
metaphor  of  the  soul.  Nature  also  disci 
plines  the  moral  character,  teaching  us  that 
all  debts  must  be  paid  by  inexorable  compen 
sation,  and  gradually  becoming  man's  sur 
rounding  conscience,  as  it  has  become  his 
speech. 

And  lastly,  nature  teaches  us  that  her  life 
is  in  the  mind  of  man;  perhaps  that  is  all 
the  life  she  has.  She  teaches  us  to  under 
stand  God;  but  what  if  she  is  only  God's 
process  of  teaching  us,  and  does  not  exist 
outside  the  process?  The  more  we  under 
stand  her,  the  less  real  she  seems  and  the 
more  real  seem  the  laws  she  has  taught.  If 
nature  is  our  language,  the  means  of  external 
izing  our  thought,  may  she  not  be  the  exter- 
nalization  of  divine  thought  in  us,  having 
no  other  existence  except  as  she  is  put  forth 
through  us? 

The  little  book   ends   as  it   begins,  with    ? 
insistence   upon   the   dignity   and   self-suffi-   j 
ciency  of  the  individual.     No  summary  of 
its  ideas  can  reproduce  the  frequent  rhap 
sody  in  which  Emerson  makes  us  see  the  con 
dition  about  which  he  is  speculating.     Like 
all  his  later  work,  the  book  is  persuasive  by 
its  spirit  rather  than  by  its  argument.    The 
individual   sentences   are   brilliant,   yet   the 


118     GREAT  AMERICAN  WRITERS 

reader  may  wonder  how  he  arrived  from  one 
to  another,  or  from  paragraph  to  paragraph. 
It  is  this  lack  of  constructive  ability  that 
has  discredited  Emerson  with  those  who 
demand  the  step  by  step  progress  of  well- 
reasoned  science;  it  is  for  this  that  Thomas 
Hughes,  otherwise  well  enough  disposed  to 
American  literature,  considered  Emerson 
little  better  than  a  charlatan.  But  in  the 
writing  of  his  youth  and  middle  age  the 
logic  is  really  there,  though  it  remains  an 
implication. 

On  August  31,  1837,  Emerson  delivered 
his  Phi  Beta  Kappa  address  at  Harvard, 
the  famous  essay  on  The  American  Scholar. 
The  great  success  of  that  occasion,  which  in 
the  opinion  of  many  hearers  was  a  veritable 
Independence  Day  for  American  scholarship, 
perhaps  brought  Emerson  the  invitation  to 
address  the  Divinity  School,  July  15,  1838. 
The  two  speeches  were  but  applications  of 
one  idea,  the  central  theory  of  Nature — 
the  idea  that  man,  in  order  to  be  free,  must 
cut  loose  from  the  past.  In  that  lobe  of 
its  brain  which  attended  to  secular  truth 
Cambridge  listened  inspired  while  Emerson 
announced  the  time  "when  the  sluggard  intel 
lect  of  this  continent  will  look  from  under  its 
iron  lids  and  fill  the  postponed  expectation 
of  the  world  with  something  better  than  the 


THE  TRANSCENDENTALISTS      119 

exertions  of  mechanical  skill.  Our  day  of 
dependence,  our  long  apprenticeship  to  the 
learning  of  other  lands,  draws  to  a  close." 
But  a  year  later  the  theological  part  of  the 
Cambridge  mind  recoiled  in  something  like 
horror  from  the  statement  that  any  tradition 
of  religion  is  worthless;  that  Christianity 
accepted  on  the  teaching  of  another  man, 
even  of  a  St.  Paul,  is  not  Christianity  but 
mere  imitation;  that  only  he  is  religious  who 
discovers  God  in  himself.  The  authorities 
of  the  school  disclaimed  all  responsibility 
for  such  doctrine,  and  one  of  the  professors 
answered  Emerson  through  a  Boston  paper. 
Old  Dr.  Ware  felt  obliged  to  preach  a  ser 
mon  on  the  situation,  and  sent  it  to  his 
former  associate,  and  Emerson  replied  in  a 
letter  of  admirable  temper.  The  incident 
passed  without  any  personal  loss  of  affection, 
though  the  Divinity  School  naturally  looked 
with  suspicion  upon  Emerson  for  years. 
Emerson  on  his  side  seems  not  to  have 
realized  that  his  doctrine,  sweeping  away 
a  long-cherished  idea  of  Christ  and  of  God, 
was  altogether  out  of  place  in  a  Christian 
pulpit.  For  most  of  his  life,  however,  he 
gave  up  church-going,  since  the  preaching 
was  not  what  he  believed  to  be  true,  but  he 
liked  his  own  children  to  go,  and  in  his  last 
years  he  resumed  the  habit. 


120      GREAT  AMERICAN  WRITERS 

Meanwhile  the  secular  lecturing  and  the 
quiet  Concord  life  continued,  and  the  intel 
lectual  ferment  then  in  progress  in  that  part 
of  New  England  was  taking  the  form  of 
concrete  experiments,  with  all  of  which 
Emerson  was  to  some  degree  connected. 
The  Transcendental  Club  was  founded  at 
the  home  of  Mr.  George  Ripley,  of  Boston, 
September  19,  1836,  for  the  purpose  of  dis 
cussing  pressing  topics  of  philosophy  and 
religion.  The  meetings  of  the  club  took  the 
form  of  "conversations,"  in  which,  of  course, 
the  readiest  talker  was  likely  to  have  the 
lion's  share.  Bronson  Alcott  and  Margaret 
Fuller  shone  in  these  gatherings,  as  well  as 
the  radical  and  scholarly  theologian,  Theo 
dore  Parker  (1810-1860);  Emerson  seems 
to  have  been,  at  least  at  first,  chiefly  a  sym 
pathetic  listener.  The  group  of  friends  at 
length  determined  to  publish  a  magazine  in 
the  interest  of  their  common  ideals, — or 
perhaps  it  would  be  fairer  to  say,  in  the  inter 
est  of  the  common  spirit  in  which  they  pur 
sued  ideals.  This  paper,  called  The  Dial, 
was  issued  quarterly  from  July,  1840,  to 
April,  1844.  Ripley  at  first  looked  after  the 
publishing,  and  Margaret  Fuller  was  the 
literary  editor,  with  some  aid  from  Emerson. 
In  1842  Emerson  had  to  come  to  the  rescue 
and  assume  full  control,  and  Miss  Peabody, 


THE  TRANSCENDENTALISTS      121 

Hawthorne's  sister-in-law,  sold  the  maga 
zine.  Some  of  the  editing  in  the  last  two 
years,  especially  when  Emerson  had  lecture 
engagements,  was  done  by  Thoreau,  whom 
Emerson  admired  in  spite  of  Miss  Fuller's 
disapproval.  They  three,  with  Alcott,  were 
the  most  distinguished  contributors. 

A  more  ambitious  output  of  Transcenden 
talism  was  the  Brook  Farm  experiment, 
which  in  point  of  date  overlaps  the  publi 
cation  of  the  magazine.  In  the  conversations 
of  the  club  there  had  been  much  discussion 
of  ideal  communities,  until  several  of  the 
younger  spirits,  notably  George  Ripley  and 
W.  H.  Channing,  were  determined  to  found 
such  a  community.  Emerson  was  busy 
with  The  Dial  at  the  time,  but  he  would  have 
advised  against  the  project  in  any  circum 
stances,  for  with  all  the  vagueness  of  his 
philosophy  he  was  shrewd  in  practical  con 
cerns.  He  had  not  expected  The  Dial  to  suc 
ceed,  and  he  saw  still  less  hope  for  Ripley 's 
scheme.  But  the  scheme  was  put  to  the 
test;  early  in  1841  a  milk-farm  of  one  hun 
dred  and  seventy  acres  was  bought  in  West 
Roxbury  for  ten  thousand  five  hundred 
dollars,  and  mortgaged  for  six  thousand 
dollars.  A  stock  company  was  formed,  and 
twenty-four  shares  of  five  hundred  dollars 
each  were  taken  by  ten  subscribers.  Haw- 


GREAT  AMERICAN  WRITERS 

thorne,  as  we  have  seen,  invested  in  two  of 
these  shares,  and  was  made  one  of  the  finan 
cial  directors  of  the  company — from  which 
circumstance  it  will  be  easily  deduced  that 
the  management  was  hardly  expert. 

The  aim  of  Brook  Farm  was  "to  insure  a 
more  natural  union  between  intellectual 
and  manual  labor  than  now  exists;  to  com 
bine  the  thinker  and  the  worker,  as  far  as 
possible,  in  the  same  individual;  to  guarantee 
the  highest  mental  freedom  by  providing 
all  with  labor  adapted  to  then*  tastes  and 
talents,  and  securing  to  them  the  fruits  of 
their  industry;  to  do  away  with  the  neces 
sity  of  menial  services  by  opening  the  benefits 
of  education  and  the  profits  of  labor  to  all; 
and  thus  to  prepare  a  society  of  liberal,  intel 
ligent,  cultivated  persons,  whose  relations 
with  each  other  would  permit  a  more  whole 
some  and  simple  life  than  can  be  led  against 
the  pressure  of  our  competitive  institutions." 
This  was  the  form  in  which  some  of  the  Tran- 
scendentalists  cared  to  emphasize  their  ideals. 
Margaret  Fuller  joined  the  experiment,  and 
Alcott  persisted  in  the  hope  of  establishing 
such  a  community  even  after  this  attempt 
failed;  Hawthorne  represented  the  type  of 
Transcendentalist  who  was  persuaded  into 
the  scheme  and  gradually  lost  his  faith  in  it; 
Emerson  disapproved  from  the  beginning. 


THE  TRANSCENDENTALISTS      123 

No  plan  for  social  betterment  in  which  the 
essential  was  an  adjustment  of  machinery 
could  win  his  confidence.  Brook  Farm  was 
finally  abandoned  in  1847.  Its  end  was 
probably  hastened  by  the  revising  of  its 
constitution  in  1844  so  as  to  include  some 
features  of  Fourierism. 

Throughout  this  period  of  his  life  Emerson 
was  busy  lecturing.  Almost  all  his  prose- 
work  was  first  seasoned  in  the  lyceum 
courses  before  it  got  permanently  into  print. 
For  this  lecturing  the  pay  was  not  very  large. 
Emerson  said  that  the  most  he  had  ever 
received  was  five  hundred  and  seventy 
dollars  for  a  series  of  ten  lectures.  In  Boston 
he  usually  received  fifty  dollars  for  a  lecture; 
in  the  country  districts  ten  dollars  and 
travelling  expenses.  Such  meagre  profits 
from  his  work  made  continuous  writing  and 
travelling  necessary.  These  lectures  were 
published  as  Essays  in  two  series,  the  first 
in  1841,  the  second  in  1844.  It  is  in  these 
volumes  that  Emerson's  Transcendentalism 
is  most  often  studied.  There  the  germs  that 
were  in  Nature  have  expanded  and  ripened, 
and  the  spirit  has  changed;  instead  of  the 
early  poetic  rhapsody  there  is  experience  of  the 
world  and  shrewd  wit.  Some  of  the  essays, 
such  as  those  on  Self-Reliance  and  Compen 
sation,  are  the  wisest  things  Emerson  wrote 


f 


L 


124      GREAT  AMERICAN  WRITERS 

The  philosophic  scheme  which  conditions 
these  writings  rather  than  appears  expli 
citly  in  them,  begins  with  the  doctrine  of 
the  Over-Soul,  which  is  as  it  were  the  con 
cluding  discovery  of  Nature.  The  Over- 
Soul  is  our  higher  self,  our  share  in  the  infi 
nite,  God.  When  we  are  receptive  to  it,  it 
possesses  us,  so  to  speak.  Possessing  us 
through  the  intellect,  it  is  genius;  possessing 
us  through  the  will,  it  is  virtue;  possessing 
us  through  the  affections,  it  is  love.  To  be 
receptive  to  this  Over-Soul,  we  must  be  in 
the  most  expansive  state  of  freedom,  and  we 
arrive  at  that  supreme  condition  only  in 
solitude,  for  in  society  the  past  imprisons  us. 
From  the  self-sufficiency  of  the  soul,  implied 
in  these  ideas,  Emerson  deduced  his  favorite 
doctrine  of  uncompromising  •  self-reliance; 
from  the  unity  of  all  men  in  the  Over-Soul, 
he  deduced  the  opposing  doctrine  of  com- 
panionableness  and  friendship.  The  use  of 
friends  is  to  recognize  at  fortunate  moments, 
in  them  as  in  nature,  some  harmony  between 
our  better  selves  and  the  Over-Soul. 

Prefaced  to  these  essays  Emerson  published 
short  poems  as  texts,  often  containing  in 
concise  form  the  essence  of  the  prose.  In 
1846  he  issued  his  first  volume  of  verse,  and 
a  second  collection  in  1867.  Splendid  as 
some  of  the  poems  are  in  their  ideal  eleva- 


THE  TRANSCENDENTALISTS      125 

tion  or  in  their  truth  to  his  character,  appre 
ciation  of  them  is  largely  an  acquired  taste. 
They  are  never  song-like;  Emerson  is  a 
thinker,  not  a  bard.  He  recognized  some 
prosaic  incrustation  of  his  nature,  through 
which  his  poetic  yearning  never  got  a  clear 
outlet.  He  is  more  successful  in  short  pieces, 
and  in  short  passages  from  the  longer  poems, 
and  best  of  all  in  single  immortal  lines. 

In  October,  1847,  Emerson  made  his 
second  visit  to  England  and  France,  this 
time  for  the  purpose  of  lecturing  in  England. 
The  experience  was  memorable  for  the 
kindness  with  which  he  was  everywhere 
received.  The  Essays  had  been  published  in 
England  as  soon  as  they  appeared  in  America, 
and  the  reading  public  were  prepared  to 
listen  to  a  prophet.  The  less  initiated  audi 
ences  were  somewhat  dazed  upon  their 
first  acquaintance  with  Emerson's  Tran 
scendentalism,  but  his  personality  won  them, 
as  it  had  won  American  audiences  outside 
of  New  England.  Perhaps  the  best  accounts 
of  his  manner  as  a  lecturer  are  to  be  got  from 
the  English  impressions  of  him — of  his  fine 
voice,  his  natural  bearing,  his  sincere  indif 
ference  to  applause,  his  elevation  of  soul. 

This  trip,  which  ended  in  July,  1848, 
furnished  him  with  the  materials  for  English 
Traits,  1856.  Before  that  he  had  published 


126     GREAT  AMERICAN  WRITERS 

Representative  Men,  1850,  which  classes  it 
self  with  Carlyle's  Heroes  and  Hero  Worship, 
different  as  the  books  are  in  doctrine;  and 
in  1860  appeared  The  Conduct  of  Life.  From 
this  later  year  dates  the  financial  success  of 
Emerson's  writings.  All  these  books,  even 
English  Traits,  are  restatements  or  applica 
tions  of  the  ideas  in  the  Essays  and  in  Nature. 
The  remainder  of  his  life  contributed  nothing 
essentially  new  to  his  work,  but  he  lived  in 
increasing  honor,  conscious  of  the  best  suc 
cess.  In  his  last  years  a  loss  of  memory 
rendered  his  other  faculties  practically  use 
less.  He  died  at  Concord,  April  27,  1882. 

The  Transcendentalist  who  stood  nearest  to 
Emerson  was  Henry  David  Thoreau,  whose 
reputation  not  improbably  will  finally  equal 
or  surpass  Emerson's.  It  has  long  been  his 
fortune  to  be  known  by  only  one  book,  but 
now  that  his  whole  work  is  available  in  his 
journals,  the  vigor  of  his  intellect  is  likely 
to  get  its  long-delayed  acknowledgment. 
And  if  we  should  compare  the  influence  of 
any  one  of  Emerson's  books  with  the  influ 
ence  of  Walden  upon  thought  in  America 
and  Europe,  the  result  would  show  in  Thoreau 
an  astonishing  power  of  fertilizing  other 
minds.  His  Transcendentalism  is  more 
practical,  his  thinking  generally  more  solid, 
than  Emerson's,  and  in  scholarship  he  was 


THE  TRANSCENDENTALISTS      127 

Emerson's  superior.  That  he  has  enjoyed 
a  certain  obscurity  is  due  to  his  own  indiffer 
ence  to  the  public,  not  to  any  lack  of  appre 
ciation  on  the  part  of  Emerson  or  his  other 
friends. 

He  was  born  in  Concord,  July  12,  1817. 
His  father  was  a  very  skilful  French  pencil- 
maker;  his  mother  was  a  Scotch  woman. 
He  had  his  education  at  the  Concord  Acad 
emy,  and  at  Harvard,  where  he  was  hi  resi 
dence  from  1833  to  1837.  He  then  tried 
school-teaching,  and  had  the  school  at  Con 
cord  for  two  years,  but  gave  it  up  finally 
because  the  school  board  believed  in  flogging 
the  pupils  and  he  did  not.  His  singularly 
sweet  temper  was  by  this  time  recognized 
in  the  village,  as  well  as  his  genius  as  a  nat 
uralist,  but  he  was  also  known  to  be  self- 
reliant  to  the  point  of  eccentricity.  He  left 
old  Dr.  Ripley's  church  in  1838,  and  refused 
to  pay  the  church  tax.  Having  mastered  his 
father's  craft,  and  having  won  praise  in 
Boston  for  making  the  best  pencil  in  America, 
he  announced  to  his  astonished  friends  that 
he  would  never  make  another  pencil;  why 
should  he  repeat  his  work?  He  solved  the 
problem  of  living,  not  by  earning  money, 
but  by  learning  to  do  without  non-essentials, 
believing  that  "a  man  is  rich  in  proportion 
to  the  number  of  things  he  can  do  without." 


128      GREAT  AMERICAN  WRITERS 

When  he  did  need  money,  he  worked  at 
anything  that  offered  itself  at  the  moment, 
and  as  he  was  a  master  carpenter,  mason, 
pencil-maker,  and  numerous  other  things, 
and  as  one  occupation  was  to  him  as  honor 
able  as  another,  he  had  no  difficulty  in 
providing  for  himself.  The  various  engage 
ments  necessary  for  his  support  came  to 
about  six  weeks'  work  every  year;  the  rest 
of  his  time  he  was  free. 

In  1838  he  tried  lecturing,  and  spoke  on 
Society  at  Concord,  but  for  such  work  he 
had  no  gifts.  At  this  time  he  became  inti 
mate  with  Emerson  and  the  other  Transcen- 
dentalists,  and  from  1841  to  1843  he  lived  in 
the  Emerson  household,  partly  because  Emer 
son  wanted  his  comradeship,  and  partly  to 
look  after  the  house  when  Emerson  was  away 
lecturing.  He  next  did  some  tutoring  in  the 
family  of  William  Emerson,  then  living  at 
Staten  Island,  New  York,  and  in  1845  he 
lived  in  his  famous  seclusion  on  Emerson's 
property  at  Walden  Pond.  The  attempt  at 
Brook  Farm  to  perfect  man  in  the  community 
suggested  to  Thoreau  the  opposite  experi 
ment  of  perfecting  man  in  solitude.  In  1847 
he  returned  to  his  father's  home  in  Concord, 
and  the  results  of  his  experiment  are  in  his 
famous  book,  Walden,  1854. 

WTiile  he  was  living  at  Walden  Pond  he 


THE  TRANSCENDENTALISTS      129 

suffered  imprisonment  for  refusing  to  pay 
his  war  tax.  He  did  not  believe  in  the 
Mexican  War,  and  felt  bound  in  conscience 
not  to  assist  it.  After  expostulating  with 
him,  the  authorities  felt  equally  bound  in 
conscience  to  lock  him  up.  He  was  arrested 
as  he  came  into  Concord  for  a  pair  of  shoes 
left  at  the  shoemaker's.  That  night  he  passed 
in  the  jail  with  great  serenity  of  mind,  even 
good  humor.  The  occasion  was  memorable 
for  his  significant  retort  to  Emerson,  who 
had  come  to  see  what  was  wrong.  "Why 
are  you  in  there,  David?"  asked  Emerson. 
"Ralph,  why  are  you  outside?"  was  the 
reply.  The  next  morning  Thoreau  was  furi 
ously  angry  to  find  that  his  family  had  paid 
his  tax  for  him.  As  there  was  no  help  for 
it,  however,  he  recovered  his  poise,  accepted 
his  freedom,  and  continued  his  way  to  the 
shoemaker's. 

Thoreau's  doctrine  and  practice  of  the 
simple  life  was  bound  up  with  his  love  of 
nature,  which  differed  from  that  of  Words 
worth  and  Emerson  in  that  it  was  more 
definitely  scientific.  His  first  book,  A  Week 
on  the  Concord,  1849,  had  failed,  perhaps 
because  that  kind  of  nature-worship  was 
somewhat  beyond  the  average  untrained 
citizen.  As  he  grew  older  Thoreau  became 
parochial  in  enthusiasm;  for  him  nature 


130      GREAT  AMERICAN  WRITERS 

came  to  mean  Concord;  when  he  read  a 
book  on  the  Arctic  regions,  he  took  delight 
in  saying  that  almost  all  the  phenomena 
there  described  could  be  observed  in  Concord. 

The  end  of  his  not  very  long  life  was  most 
honorable,  not  only  because  of  the  steadily 
accumulating  respect  for  his  integrity,  but 
because  of  his  heroic  and  eloquent  defense 
of  John  Brown.  Concord  did  not  approve  of 
Brown's  raid,  although  the  abolitionist  senti 
ment  there  was  strong.  Therefore,  Thoreau 
knew  that  he  was  braving  public  sentiment 
when  he  determined  to  plead  for  the  man  then 
on  trial  for  his  life.  He  invited  all  Concord 
to  the  meeting  house  on  a  Sunday  evening 
to  hear  his  plea  for  Brown.  Emerson  and 
other  friends  tried  to  dissuade  him,  but  he 
persisted,  and  for  once  the  power  of  his 
feelings  made  him  an  eloquent  lecturer. 
The  audience  listened  in  silence,  but  with 
sympathy,  and  he  was  asked  to  repeat  the 
address  elsewhere. 

The  last  important  moment  of  this  solitary 
life  was  therefore  in  a  social  setting,  in  an  act 
of  what  he  deemed  to  be  public  service.  His 
health  had  already  become  a  matter  of  con 
cern,  and  he  died  of  consumption,  May  6, 
1862. 

Thoreau 's  writing  usually  takes  the  form 
of  a  journal,  in  which  the  thread  of  narra- 


THE  TRANSCENDENTALISTS       131 

tive  bears  this  resemblance  to  the  thread  of 
argument  in  Emerson — that  its  chief  interest 
lies  in  the  descriptions  and  meditations  which 
interrupt  it.  In  these  passages  Thoreau 
reveals  a  character  of  great  sanity,  with 
gifts  of  positive  realism  and  a  wealth  of 
sense  not  often  associated  with  the  idealizing 
faculty.  He  is  not  a  dreamer  but  an  observer; 
his  vision  is  both  thoughtful  and  poetic,  but 
he  looks  steadily  at  \\ie.<y 

The  third  in  importance  of  the  Transcen- 
dentalists  is  Sarah  Margaret  Fuller,  born  in 
Cambridgeport,  May  23,  1810.  Her  father, 
who  was  a  lawyer  of  some  importance  in 
public  life,  tried  to  give  her  a  precocious 
education,  and  only  partly  succeeded,  but 
the  attempt  ruined  her  health.  He  died 
when  she  was  twenty-five  years  old,  and  she 
was  forced  to  care  for  her  family.  After 
some  teaching  in  Alcott's  school  and  else 
where,  she  settled  near  Boston,  conducted 
"conversations"  in  the  Transcendentalist 
fashion,  and  won  recognition,  more  by 
conversation  than  by  writing,  as  a  literary 
critic.  Her  personality  seems  to  have  been 
strangely  inspiring,  although  she  was  not 
attractive  in  appearance,  and  the  secret  of  her 
charm  is  lost.  But  her  knowledge  of  Greek 
and  German  literature  would  have  been 
almost  enough,  even  without  her  powers  of 


132     GREAT  AMERICAN  WRITERS 

inspiration,  to  set  her  far  above  the  incom 
petent  American  criticism  of  her  time.  She 
was  the  literary  leader  of  Transcendentalism, 
and  the  natural  editor  for  The  Dial,  in  which 
much  of  her  best  writing  appeared.  Prob 
ably  she  will  hold  her  place  longest  with  a 
few  of  her  poems,  but  her  critical  service 
was  great  at  the  time;  she  introduced  Goethe 
into  New  England,  for  example,  much  as 
Emerson  there  introduced  Carlyle. 

Miss  Fuller  travelled  much  in  America, 
was  for  a  while  literary  editor  of  the  New 
York  Tribune,  under  Horace  Greeley,  and 
spent  some  years  abroad.  It  is  perhaps  not 
the  least  of  her  achievements  that  she  was 
the  only  prominent  Transcendentalist  who 
found  Concord  and  its  neighborhood  some 
what  parochial.  She  preferred  Italy,  for 
example.  In  1847  she  secretly  married 
Giovanni  Angelo,  Marquis  Ossoli,  and  a 
son  was  born  in  1848.  In  May,  1850,  she 
started  for  America  with  her  husband  and 
child,  but  after  a  long  voyage  the  vessel  was 
wrecked  on  Fire  Island,  July  19,  and  the 
family  were  all  drowned.  A  collected  edition 
of  her  writings  appeared  in  1855. 

Amos  Bronson  Alcott  was  perhaps  more 
nearly  the  fountain  head  of  Transcenden 
talism  than  Emerson,  but  his  influence  was 
unliterary,  and  in  a  record  of  American 


THE  TRANSCENDENTALISTS      133 

literature  he  stands  much  below  the  three 
writers  already  treated.  He  was  born  in 
Connecticut,  November  29,  1799.  His  youth 
was  spent  in  various  attempts  at  industry, 
in  all  of  which  he  demonstrated  his  sorry 
proportion  of  practical  sense  to  fine  ideals. 
In  his  twenty-seventh  year  he  settled  into 
school  teaching,  and  developed  ideas  of 
pedagogy  far  in  advance  of  his  time.  These 
ideas  he  put  into  practice  in  his  most  famous 
school,  founded  at  Boston  in  1834.  The 
institution  failed,  however,  after  a  brilliant 
promise  of  success,  and  with  his  family  Alcott 
removed  to  Concord.  The  second  of  his 
daughters,  Louise  May  Alcott  (1832-1888), 
described  the  family  habit  of  plain  living 
and  high  thinking  in  Little  Women,  1867. 

Alcott's  service  to  American  literature  is 
chiefly  as  an  inspirer  of  Emerson.  His 
Orphic  Sayings,  contributed  to  The  Dial, 
have  little  value  apart  from  the  general 
movement  of  Transcendentalism.  His  at 
tempt  to  start  a  community,  "Fruitlands," 
after  Brook  Farm  had  failed,  was  only  another 
illustration  of  how  impervious  his  ideals 
were  to  experience.  The  remainder  of  his 
life  he  occupied  himself  with  his  lectures  or 
"conversations,"  at  which  kind  of  expres 
sion  he  excelled  all  the  other  Transcenden- 
talists.  Impractical  and  even  ridiculous  as 


134      GREAT,  AMERICAN  WRITERS 

he  could  sometimes  be,  the  testimony  to 
his  nobility  of  spirit  and  inspiration  is  too 
unanimous  to  be  disregarded.  His  fame 
rests  chiefly  on  that  testimony,  and  on  his 
reports  of  his  pedagogical  ideas.  He  died 
March  4,  1888,  having  lived  to  see  himself 
the  patron  saint  and  thinker  of  the  Concord 
School  of  Philosophy.  With  the  poets 
Christopher  Cranch,  Jones  Very,  and  Ellery 
Channing,  with  George  Ripley,  the  critic, 
with  numerous  lecturers  and  preachers  of 
the  period,  with  philosophers  like  the  elder 
Henry  James,  with  the  novelist  Sylvester 
Judd,  he  remains  to  the  student  a  figure  of 
interest  not  untouched  by  pathos,  but  to 
the  large  public  scarcely  more  than  a  name. 

CHAPTER  VII 

THE  NEW  ENGLAND   POETS 

DURING  the  thirty  years  that  preceded 
the  war  between  the  States,  New  England 
became  once  more  the  literary  centre  of 
America,  and  the  period  may  be  called  with 
no  great  exaggeration  the  Golden  Age  of 
American  Literature.  The  greatest  poets, 
the  greatest  prose  romancer,  the  greatest 
philosopher,  the  greatest  interpreter  of  nature, 
the  greatest  orator,  and  the  greatest  his- 


THE  NEW  ENGLAND  POETS      135 

torians  all  belonged  to  the  small  section, 
which  had  declined  in  political  influence,  but 
had  increased  its  wealth,  improved  its  edu 
cational  facilities,  and  retained  much  of 
its  homogeneity  of  character.  Boston  and 
Cambridge  were  the  centre  of  the  region's 
literary  and  spiritual  activity,  and  although 
it  is  in  some  respects  ridiculous  to  speak  of  the 
first  of  these  cities  as  the  Athens  of  America, 
there  is  more  excuse  for  the  phrase  than 
appears  at  first  thought.  Boston,  like  Athens, 
was  the  capital  of  a  comparatively  small, 
homogeneous,  alert  people,  and  it  was  a 
centre  of  creative  energy  in  thought  and  in 
at  least  one  branch  of  art. 

Of  all  the  New  Englanders  who  during 
this  period  laid  the  enduring  foundations  of 
American  Literature,  by  far  the  most  popu 
lar  and  perhaps  the  most  influential — save 
possibly  Emerson — was  Henry  Wadsworth 
Longfellow,  the  poet  who  shared  with  Tenny 
son  the  allegiance  of  the  Anglo-Saxon  world 
during  a  large  part  of  the  last  century. 
He  was  born  of  exceptionally  good  stock 
on  February  27,  1807  at  Portland,  Maine, 
a  city  which  only  the  year  before  had  been 
the  birthplace  of  a  small  poet  and  prolific 
journalist,  Nathaniel  Parker  Willis  (1806- 
1867),  whose  once  brilliant  fame  has  suffered 
a  not  altogether  merited  eclipse.  Longfellow 


136      GREAT  AMERICAN  WRITERS 

did  not,  like  Willis,  attain  notoriety  too  sud 
denly,  and  although  he  too  spent  some  time 
in  travel,  he  did  not,  like  Willis,  expatriate 
himself  for  a  while  or  leave  New  England  to 
reside  in  the  more  cosmopolitan  and  turbu 
lent  New  York.  The  younger  of  the  two 
Portland  boys  doubtless  had  the  deeper 
and  the  quieter  nature.  He  was  always  a 
lover  of  the  sea  and  later  he  expressed  some 
of  its  power  and  charm  in  his  poetry.  As  a 
boy  also,  and  as  a  college  student  at  Bow- 
doin,  he  yielded  himself  to  the  fascination  of 
books,  with  the  result  that  he  became 
one  of  the  most  important  transmitters  of 
old-world  culture  to  his  provincial  country 
men.  Such  a  youth  was  sure  to  write  verses 
early,  and  some  of  his  juvenile  poetry  was 
praised  in  an  absurd  way,  which,  fortunately, 
did  not  turn  his  head. 

On  the  whole,  Longfellow's  life  was  unevent 
ful,  and  save  for  two  bereavements,  singu 
larly  free  from  strain  and  care.  He  was 
offered  a  professorship  of  modern  languages 
in  his  alma  mater  and  was  enabled  to  spend 
three  years  in  Europe  in  preparation  for  its 
duties.  On  his  return  he  became  a  good 
teacher,  wrote  some  modest  text-books, 
and  contributed  reviews  and  sketches  of 
travel  -to  periodicals.  A  collection  of  his 
sketches  and  tales  was  published  in  1835 


THE  NEW  ENGLAND  POETS      137 

under  the  title  of  Outre-Mer;  A  Pilgrimage 
beyond  the  Sea.  In  other  words,  he  was  still 
at  twenty-eight  a  rather  callow  and  senti 
mental  follower  of  Irving.  About  this  time 
he  received  a  call  to  the  chair  which  the 
far  more  scholarly  Ticknor  was  relinquish 
ing  at  Harvard,  and  he  sailed  with  his  young 
wife  on  another  voyage  for  Europe  in  quest 
of  culture.  His  wife  died  in  Holland,  and 
grief  for  her  opened  his  heart  to  the  influ 
ence  of  German  sentiment,  as  is  shown  by 
his  prose  romance  Hyperion  and  by  some 
of  his  poems.  He  returned  to  America 
late  in  1836  and  filled  his  chair  at  Harvard 
acceptably  until  he  retired  in  1854.  He  had 
long  found  his  duties  irksome,  partly  because 
too  much  drudgery  was  laid  upon  him, 
partly  because  his  bent  was  that  of  the  poet 
rather  than  that  of  the  teacher  or  scholar. 
Yet  one  scarcely  sympathizes  with  the  com 
plaints  he  utters  in  his  diary,  for  he  was 
most  comfortably  established  in  the  well- 
known  Craigie  House,  he  made  an  excep 
tionally  happy  second  marriage,  he  enjoyed 
much  congenial  society,  and  he  was  the  most 
popular  poet  of  his  day.  Ever  since  1839 
when  he  published  Voices  of  the  Night  con 
taining  the  Psalm  of  Life  and  other  pieces 
admirably  adapted  to  the  spiritual  aspira 
tions  of  his  countrymen  and  not  too  sophis- 


138     GREAT  AMERICAN  WRITERS 

ticated  in  style  to  answer  their  simple 
demands  in  matters  of  esthetics,  he  had  been 
the  recipient  of  a  blended  admiration  and 
esteem  more  widespread  and  genuine  than 
falls  to  the  lot  of  any  save  the  most  favored 
of  mortals.  Longfellow  was  not  favored 
with  exceptional  genius,  as  poetical  genius 
is  usually  appraised,  but  few  writers  have 
ever  been  more  felicitously  endowed  with 
that  power  of  interpreting  a  people's  heart 
which  wins  for  him  who  exerts  it  unmere- 
tricious  fame. 

It  would  be  out  of  place  to  attempt  to 
give  a  list  of  Longfellow's  volumes  of  poetry 
or  to  dwell  upon  his  sporadic  attempts  to 
win  favor  by  his  prose.  With  his  early  vol 
umes  he  made  himself  popular  by  such  pieces 
as  The  Village  Blacksmith  and  Excelsior, 
but  he  also  won  favor  from  more  critical 
readers  by  the  rhythmical  mastery  and  the 
romantic  spirit  to  be  found  in  such  a  ballad 
as  The  Skeleton  in  Armor.  Apparently  he 
owed  more  to  German  poetry  than  he  did 
to  English  romantic  poets  such  as  Keats 
and  Coleridge,  a  fact  in  which  we  may  find 
a  partial  explanation  of  his  appeal  to  the 
general  public  and  of  his  failure  to  satisfy 
latter-day  exigent  readers.  Perhaps  when 
critics  and  poets  acquire  greater  catholicity 
of  taste,  his  simple  narrative  and  reflective 


THE  NEW  ENGLAND  POETS      139 

poems  will  be  more  fully  appreciated.  In 
the  more  elaborate  forms  of  poetry,  or  if 
one  will,  the  more  artificial  forms,  his 
success,  save  in  his  sonnets,  some  of  which 
are  admirable,  was  never  very  marked. 
He  could  impart  charm  to  The  Golden 
Legend  of  1851  based  upon  Hartmann  von 
Aue's  Der  Arme  Heinrich,  but  when  later  he 
added  to  this  The  Divine  Tragedy  and  The 
New  England  Tragedies  in  order  to  make  up 
his  ambitious  poem  Christus,  he  failed  com 
pletely  to  attract  any  class  of  readers.  He 
had  no  dramatic  genius  and  his  real  story 
telling  gifts  did  not  move  at  an  epic  level. 
Hence  it  was  fortunate  for  him  that  Haw 
thorne  gave  him  the  theme  of  the  pathetic 
idyll  Evangeline,  which  in  1847  set  the  seal 
upon  his  popularity,  and  that  in  Hiawatha  and 
The  Courtship  of  Miles  Standish  he  found 
subjects  which  both  satisfied  readers  who 
demanded  poetry  based  upon  the  past  of 
America  and  suited  his  own  genuine  but 
far  from  lofty  powers.  As  he  was  not  a 
master  of  blank  verse,  he  was  wise  in  adopt 
ing  for  these  poems  exotic  measures — hex 
ameters  and  rhymeless  trochaic  tetrameters — 
whatever  may  be  thought  of  the  amount  of 
profit  his  innovations  are  likely  to  afford  to 
other  poets.  The  Courtship  of  Miles  Stan- 
dish,  perhaps  the  least  facile  and  most  au- 


140      GREAT  AMERICAN  WRITERS 

identically  American  of  his  ambitious  poems, 
is  good  enough  to  give  its  author  a  high 
rank  among  modern  narrative  poets,  and  there 
are  several  pieces  to  be  found  in  the  Tales 
of  a  Wayside  Inn  that  almost  justify  the  be 
lief  that  Longfellow's  gifts  as  a  story-teller 
constitute  the  best  basis  for  his  fame. 

A  little  reflection,  however,  causes  one  to 
doubt  whether  even  the  still  popular  Evan- 
geline  and  Hiawatha,  which  are  studied  in 
American  schools,  or  such  spirited  poems  as 
Paul  Revere's  Ride  and  The  Saga  of  King 
Olaf  are  likely  to  wear  as  well  in  the  cen 
turies  to  come  as  the  small  group  of  reflective 
lyrics  such  as  The  Bridge  and  The  Day  is 
Done,  in  which  Longfellow  makes  a  sweet, 
simple  appeal  to  the  universal  heart  of  man. 
He  was  a  master  of  pensive  sentiment,  which 
he  expressed  in  stanzas,  the  art  of  which  is 
as  unobtrusive  as  it  is  adequate,  being  neither 
sophisticated  nor  crude.  What  can  be  better 
in  their  way  than  these  lines  from  The  Bridge? 

"And  I  think  how  many  thousands 

Of  care-encumbered  men, 
Each  bearing  his  burden  of  sorrow, 
Have  crossed  the  bridge  since  then. 

"I  see  the  long  procession 

Still  passing  to  and  fro, 
The  young  heart  hot  and  restless, 
And  the  old  subdued  and  slow! 


THE  NEW  ENGLAND  POETS      141 

"And  forever  and  forever, 

As  long  as  the  river  flows, 
As  long  as  the  heart  has  passions, 
As  long  as  life  has  woes; 

"The  moon  and  its  broken  reflection 

And  its  shadows  shall  appear, 
As  the  symbol  of  love  in  heaven, 
And  its  wavering  image  here." 

What  the  poet  who  could  write  thus 
suffered  when  in  July,  1861  his  charming 
wife  was  accidently  burned  to  death,  can  be 
imagined  rather  than  described.  He  sur 
vived  her  until  March  24,  1882,  and  about 
four  years  before  he  died  he  wrote  upon  his 
great  bereavement  a  beautiful  sonnet,  The 
Cross  of  Snow.  As  a  solace  he  undertook  a 
translation  of  the  Divine  Comedy,  which, 
despite  a  certain  facility,  has  received  high 
praise.  He  had  long  before  shown  himself 
to  be  an  excellent  translator  of  German 
lyrics,  and,  as  has  already  been  said,  not  the 
least  of  his  claims  upon  the  gratitude  of 
Americans  is  the  service  he  rendered  through 
out  his  life  as  a  transmitter  of  European 
culture.  He  deserved  amply  the  blended 
love  and  homage  paid  him  during  his  de 
clining  years,  and  it  would  seem  that  he 
deserves,  now  that  sufficient  time  has  been 
allowed  for  the  detraction  that  usually 


142     GREAT  AMERICAN  WRITERS 

follows  a  writer's  death,  a  less  grudging 
acknowledgment  of  his  unspectacular  but 
sterling  merits  than  is  awarded  him  by 
would-be  representatives  of  aristocratic  taste. 
If  one  were  certain  that  the  contemners  of 
Longfellow  spent  most  of  their  time  with 
Sophocles  and  Milton,  one  could  bear  with 
more  equanimity  their  efforts  to  disparage 
one  of  the  truest  poets  and,  within  limits,  most 
accomplished  artists  America  has  produced. 
John  Greenleaf  Whittier,  although  in  some 
respects  a  more  influential  poet  than  Long 
fellow,  never  attained  the  latter 's  popularity. 
He  too  was  born  in  1807 — on  December 
17 — and  he  also  represented  good  New 
England  stock,  but  a  stock  quite  different 
from  that  of  the  Longfellows.  His  parents 
were  Quakers  who  lived  at  East  Haverhill, 
Massachusetts,  where  his  father  was  a  small 
farmer.  The  boy  inherited  their  primitive 
virtues  and  grew  up  amid  straitened  circum 
stances  faithfully  described  in  the  best  of 
his  sustained  poems,  the  idyll  entitled  Snow- 
Bound.  He  got  little  schooling,  but  he  read 
a  few  good  books  and  showed  capacity  for 
writing  verses.  Some  of  his  poems  were 
published  in  a  neighboring  newspaper  and 
brought  Whittier  to  the  notice  of  its  editor, 
William  Lloyd  Garrison,  who  urged  that  the 
young  farm  laborer  should  be  sent  back  to 


THE  NEW  ENGLAND  POETS      143 

school.  This  advice  was  followed  as  far  as 
was  practicable,  and  then,  for  a  while, 
Whittier  secured  employment  as  a  journalist 
at  Boston.  He  later  returned  to  the  paternal 
farm,  but  after  his  father's  death  he  tried 
journalism  in  Hartford  until  he  was  forced 
by  feeble  health  to  return  home.  He  had 
managed  to  make  not  a  little  local  reputation 
for  himself  as  a  versifier,  and  he  had  begun 
to  take  a  strong  interest  in  politics.  In  1833 
he  published  a  pamphlet,  Justice  and  Ex 
pediency,  which  aligned  him  with  the  Aboli 
tionists  and  made  a  conspicuous  career  of 
office-holding  impossible.  One  can  hardly 
regret  that  Whittier  became  a  sort  of  Tyr- 
taeus,  instead  of  a  WTiig  politician  and  orator 
treading  reverently  in  the  footsteps  of  Henry 
Clay,  nor  can  one  fail  to  perceive  that  his 
knowledge  of  politics  made  the  new  anti- 
slavery  advocate  a  less  visionary  leader 
than  some  of  his  fellow-crusaders. 

In  1836  Whittier  removed  to  the  village  of 
Amesbury,  where  about  four  years  later,  after 
a  brief  and  stormy  experience  as  an  anti- 
slavery  editor  in  Philadelphia,  he  made  his 
permanent  abode.  Meanwhile  he  had  pub 
lished  Mogg  Megone,  a  poem  on  a  colonial 
theme  treated  in  the  manner  of  Scott,  and 
he  had  begun  the  stirring  series  of  poems  in 
behalf  of  freedom  which  is  the  chief  basis 


144      GREAT  AMERICAN  WRITERS 

of  his  fame.  On  the  side  of  art,  these  early 
verses  are  immature  and  crude,  but  they 
make  a  manly  appeal  to  the  best  in  human 
nature,  and  it  is  no  wonder  that  they  were 
widely  copied  by  the  newspapers  of  the  Free 
States.  They  brought  their  author  little 
money,  however,  and  his  feeble  health 
prevented  him  from  being  active  in  more 
profitable  ways,  hence  he  lived  in  more  or 
less  restricted  circumstances  until  1866, 
the  year  in  which  the  popular  Snow-Bound 
was  published.  For  some  years  he  contrib 
uted  frequently  to  the  National  Era,  the  period 
ical  in  which  Uncle  Tom's  Cabin  first  appeared, 
and  he  did  not  confine  himself  to  poetry, 
as  the  collected  volumes  of  his  prose  works 
will  prove  to  any  one  who  will  take  the 
trouble  to  examine  them.  The  prose  of 
poets  is  usually  good,  and  Whittier's  prose 
is  not  a  striking  exception  to  the  rule;  but 
on  the  whole  it  has  little  vitality.  It  is  as 
the  Quaker  Poet  of  Freedom,  who  helped  to 
bring  on  the  great  contest  over  slavery, 
and  during  its  progress,  despite  his  honest 
advocacy  of  the  peace  dear  to  his  sect, 
managed  to  encourage  the  North  by  patriotic 
lyrics  like  Barbara  Frietchie,  that  Whittier 
has  impressed  himself  upon  the  world,  and 
it  is  as  a  poet  of  human  freedom  that  he  must 
live  if  he  is  to  hold  his  own  with  posterity. 


THE  NEW  ENGLAND  POETS       145 

He  has  to  his  credit  some  good  poetry  de 
scriptive  of  nature  in  New  England,  and  at  his 
best  he  is  a  true  poet  of  the  domestic  affec 
tions — witness  the  verses  entitled  Memories 
— but  his  success  in  these  attractive  fields 
is  scarcely  sufficiently  conspicuous  to  support 
the  position  he  has  held  for  two  generations 
in  American  literature. 

In  part  this  position  is  clearly  due  to 
Whittier's  character,  in  part  to  the  fact  that 
he  long  survived  to  receive  the  homage 
of  the  New  America  that  sprang  into  being 
after  the  Civil  War.  He  lived  until  Sep 
tember  7,  1892,  and  it  seemed  as  if  his 
tender  heart,  denied  the  pleasure  of  lavish 
ing  itself  upon  wife  and  children,  had  spent 
itself  in  affection  for  country  and  mankind. 
He  mellowed  soon,  especially  after  the  death 
of  a  favorite  sister  and  after  the  war  had 
removed  the  hated  institution  of  slavery. 
No  vindictiveness  toward  old  opponents 
marred  his  career  as  it  did  that  of  many  a 
politician.  The  collections  of  verse  that 
appeared  with  fair  frequency  during  his  latter 
years  might  leave  some  doubt  of  their  author's 
high  genius,  but  none  of  his  essential  nobility. 

How  far  his  poetical  works  in  their  entirety 
are  read  to-day  and  with  what  feelings,  it 
would  be  hard  to  say.  His  elaborate  poems 
are  few  and  unimportant,  and  his  short 


146      GREAT  AMERICAN  WRITERS 

poems  are  very  numerous,  amounting  to 
several  hundreds  and  continually  being  in 
creased  by  accessions  from  manuscript  sources. 
From  each  of  the  chief  divisions  he  adopted 
— the  Poems  of  Nature,  the  Ballads  and 
Narrative  Poems,  the  Personal  Poems,  the 
Anti-slavery  Poems,  and  the  Poems  Sub 
jective  and  Reminiscent — anthologists  and 
readers  have  selected  pieces  that  in  spirit 
and  execution  deserve  sincere,  though  in 
but  few  cases  perhaps,  enthusiastic  praise. 
But  both  in  these  chosen  poems,  such  as 
Maud  Mutter,  Ichdbod,  Massachusetts  to  Vir 
ginia,  and  In  Schooldays,  to  name  no  others, 
and  in  the  hundreds  upon  hundreds  that 
remain  one  feels  that  Whittier  was  a  poet  by 
inspiration  rather  than  a  poet  by  inspiration 
and  art  combined.  His  emotional  qualifi 
cations  were  of  a  high  order,  and,  although 
he  was  often  careless  in  metrical  and  stylis 
tic  technic,  he  generally  managed  to  attain 
a  fair  level  of  excellence,  but,  on  the  whole, 
he  displayed  no  great  strength  of  intellect 
or  of  imagination  and  little  of  that  marked 
individuality  of  temperament  which  in  the 
opinion  of  many  is  the  chief  mark  of  genius. 
In  other  words,  he  not  only,  like  most  other 
poets,  has  a  large  mass  of  rather  factitious, 
undistinguished  work  to  carry  in  the  re 
vised  edition  of  his  poems,  but  he  has  not  a 


THE  NEW  ENGLAND  POETS      147 

well-defined  domain  of  mastery  save  perhaps 
in  the  verses  inspired  by  the  contest  over 
slavery.  These  have  a  moral  and  an  histori 
cal  value  that  may  long  continue  to  lend  them 
vitality,  but  it  is  obvious  that  one  could  feel 
more  convinced  of  Whittier's  high  and  per 
manent  importance  as  a  poet  if,  like  Long 
fellow,  for  example,  he  were  conspicuously 
excellent  as  a  narrative  poet  and  made  a 
special  appeal  through  a  group  of  reflective 
pieces  to  the  universal  heart  of  man.  Parti 
san  admiration  such  as  Poe  has  secured 
is  out  of  the  question  for  him,  and  he  makes 
no  such  appeal  to  the  serious  minded  as  does 
Emerson.  His  hold  upon  unsophisticated 
readers  who  are  docile  to  tradition  and  full 
of  patriotism  has  doubtless  continued  fairly 
strong,  and  the  teaching  of  American  liter 
ature  in  the  schools  will  undoubtedly  help 
to  maintain  his  reputation;  but,  when  all 
is  said,  one  is  left  wondering  how  the  sophis 
ticated  public  of  two  generations  hence 
will  regard  him. 

The  future,  however,  does  not  concern  us 
as  much  as  the  present,  and  there  are  many 
of  Whittier's  poems  which  repay  a  careful 
examination  of  his  works  and  which,  if  pub 
lished  as  a  volume  of  winnowed  selections, 
would  go  far  toward  justifying  the  op'nion 
that  none  of  the  New  England  poets  had  a 


148      GREAT  AMERICAN  WRITERS 

greater  native  endowment  than  he.  Per 
haps  if  he  had  had  the  early  advantages 
of  education  granted  to  Longfellow  and 
Lowell,  or  their  opportunities  of  contact 
with  the  culture  of  the  old  world,  his  art 
would  have  been  refined  without  loss  of 
strength  and  his  imagination  stimulated. 
Even  as  it  is,  few  American  poets  have 
to  their  credit  more  lovely  stanzas  than  those 
composing  the  Proem  to  the  first  general 
collection  of  his  poems,  and  no  American 
poem  of  rural  life  forms  a  sweeter  or  sin- 
cerer  idyll  than  Snow-Bound,  despite  the 
fact  that  it  is  couched  in  facile  octosyllabics 
and  that  it  has  few  or  no  touches  of  high 
imaginative  power.  Its  simplicity  and  ten 
derness  have  insured  it  greater  consideration 
from  Whittier's  countrymen  than  it  would 
have  obtained  had  its  strictly  poetic  merits 
been  of  higher  order;  for  although  a  demo 
cratic  public  may  be  always  trusted  to 
seek  the  best,  it  does  not  always  recognize 
it.  No  public,  however,  could  have  failed 
to  be  moved  by  such  stirring  occasional 
poems  as  Randolph  of  Roanoke  and  Moloch 
in  State  Street  or  by  not  a  few  of  his  ballads, 
factitious  though  many  of  the  latter  class 
of  poems  may  seem  to  be.  Perhaps  the 
greatest  of  all  his  poems  is  an  occasional 
one — the  short  but  terrible  lament  entitled 


THE  NEW  ENGLAND  POETS      149 

Ichabod  written  when  that  New  England 
idol,  Daniel  Webster,  had,  in  the  eyes  of  the 
anti-slavery  men,  fallen  from  his  pedestal. 
Here  for  once  Whittier's  art  was  flawless. 
The  stanzas  fairly  glow  with  repressed  pas 
sion,  and  one  feels  that  no  apologist  for 
Webster,  no  matter  how  just  his  contention 
that  they  do  the  great  orator  injustice, 
will  ever  be  able  fully  to  counteract  their 
deadly  effect.  It  is  the  irony  of  fate  that  a 
kindly  Quaker  should  have  shown  his  high 
est  reach  of  poetic  power  in  such  a  stinging 
stanza  as 

"All  else  is  gone;  from  those  great  eyes 

The  soul  has  fled: 

When  faith  is  lost,  when  honour  dies, 
The  man  is  dead." 

The  third  of  the  New  England  group  of 
poets,  Dr.  Oliver  Wendell  Holmes,  is  prob 
ably  most  often  thought  of  as  the  genial 
autocrat — that  is,  as  a  writer  of  prose.  Holmes 
was  born  at  Cambridge,  Massachusetts, 
August  29,  1809 — the  year  of  Lincoln  and 
Poe  and  of  many  other  great  men,  not 
Americans.  He  was  the  son  of  Dr.  Abiel 
Holmes,  historian  and  divine,  and  he  came 
of  true  New  England  Brahmin  stock.  His 
geniality  and  urbanity  were  in  direct  propor 
tion  with  his  calvinistic  ancestors'  sternness 
and  narrowness,  and  it  is  scarcely  fanciful 


150     GREAT  AMERICAN  WRITERS 

to  regard  him  as  a  changeling.  It  is  cer 
tainly  not  fanciful  to  see  in  him  one  of  the 
most  effective  of  the  liberal  spirits  who 
in  the  first  half  of  the  nineteenth  century 
successfully  stormed  the  citadel  of  New 
England  orthodoxy.  Stormed,  however,  is 
not  the  right  word,  especially  for  Holmes. 
His  work  was  rather  that  of  a  sapper. 

It  was  only  natural  that  a  Cambridge  lad 
should  be  sent  to  Harvard,  and  at  that 
college  Holmes  graduated  in  the  class  of 
1829,  familiar  to  the  reader  of  his  long 
series  of  class-reunion  poems.  His  humor, 
sentiment,  and  knowledge  of  the  college  tradi 
tions  made  him  the  ideal  Harvard  laureate, 
but  he  would  have  been  a  good  occasional 
poet  in  any  environment.  He  began  writing 
verse  early,  and  the  year  after  graduating 
he  attracted  attention  by  a  short  poem 
entitled  Old  Ironsides,  in  which  he  pleaded 
for  the  preservation  of  the  famous  frigate 
Constitution.  Then  he  wrote  what  is  per 
haps  the  most  perfect  of  his  contributions 
to  society  verse,  The  Last  Leaf,  and  displayed 
his  skill  in  frankly  comic  productions.  Later 
attempts  in  more  ambitious  fields  of  poetry 
were  scarcely  successful,  and  it  may  be  held 
with  some  justice  that  he  was  as  good  a 
poet  in  his  youth  as  in  his  maturity  and 
old  age.  He  was  quick  too  in  displaying  his 


THE  NEW  ENGLAND  POETS      151 

talents  for  the  discursive  conversational 
essay,  as  is  proved  by  the  fact  that  in  1831 
and  1832  he  published  in  a  magazine  two 
papers  entitled  The  Autocrat  of  the  Break- 
fast  Table. 

Despite  this  almost  premature  display  of 
literary  ability  he  did  not  contemplate  a 
strictly  literary  life,  but  studied  medicine, 
first  at  Boston,  then  at  Paris.  On  his  return 
from  Europe  he  practised  his  profession  in 
Boston  until  1847,  when  he  accepted  the 
chair  of  anatomy  in  Harvard,  having  pre 
viously  filled  the  same  post  for  a  short  time 
in  another  college.  He  had  gained  some  dis 
tinction  as  a  medical  writer,  had  married, 
and  had  collected  his  poems  in  a  volume  to 
which  he  now  furnished  a  companion.  Both 
collections  contained  pieces  of  merit,  but 
neither  gave  proof  of  much  capacity  in  the 
higher  types  of  imaginative  poetry.  Holmes 
was  easily  the  best  man  to  invite  to  prepare  a 
poem  to  be  read  at  a  public  dinner,  and  no  one 
could  vie  with  him  in  producing  polished  heroic 
couplets  of  the  sort  that  pleased  eighteenth- 
century  ears;  but  he  was  writing  for  a  public 
that  had  become  acquainted  with  Words 
worth,  Coleridge,  Byron,  Shelley,  and  Keats 
and  that  was  beginning  to  admire  Tennyson 
and  Longfellow.  Hence,  although  he  attained 
a  good  reputation  as  a  poet,  particularly  in 


152      GREAT  AMERICAN  WRITERS 

New  England,  he  made  no  profound  appeal 
to  any  class  of  readers,  and  he  would  probably 
never  have  risen  to  be  included  among  the 
major  American  authors  had  he  not,  when 
nearly  fifty,  taken  up  his  early  dropped 
role  of  gracious  and  wise  essayist.  Whether, 
when  we  become  able  to  judge  romantic 
poets  and  critics  with  some  sort  of  sanity, 
and  to  redress  some  of  the  wrongs  they 
have  done  to  the  poets  of  the  eighteenth 
century,  we  shall  read  the  poetry  of  Holmes 
in  mass  with  much  greater  pleasure  than  we 
do  now,  may  be  doubted — much  of  it  is  too 
factitious  and  thin — but  perhaps  we  shall 
do  greater  justice  to  the  taste  which  impelled 
the  good  Doctor  to  abide  by  the  classic 
style  of  his  predecessors,  and  we  may  be 
able  better  to  understand  and  appreciate 
the  attempts  he  made  to  defend  his  favorite 
poetic  measure. 

Holmes  filled  his  Harvard  chair  from 
1847  to  1882  and  was  a  faithful  and  success 
ful  teacher.  One  at  least  of  his  contributions 
to  medical  literature  is  acknowledged  to  be 
of  importance,  and  it  is  a  comfort  to  think 
that  he  can  be  added  to  the  roll  of  men  of 
genius  who  have  had  a  good  deal  of  method 
without  any  madness.  There  might  have  been 
some  question  of  his  genuis,  however,  had  not 
a  fortunate  event  happened  just  ten  years 


THE  NEW  ENGLAND  POETS       153 

after  he  entered  upon  his  duties  at  Harvard. 
This  was  the  founding  of  the  Atlantic 
Monthly  at  Boston  in  1857 — a  magazine 
destined  to  be  the  most  important  of  Ameri 
can  literary  periodicals,  coming  as  it  did 
after  the  genius  of  the  country  had  been 
liberated  in  New  England  during  the  period 
of  Transcendentalist  and  Anti-slavery  ac 
tivity.  Lowell,  the  editor  of  the  new  monthly, 
applied  to  Holmes  for  contributions,  and  the 
latter  recalled  the  articles  he  had  written 
as  "Autocrat"  twenty -five  years  before  for 
an  earlier  organ  of  New  England  culture. 
It  was  not  exactly  the  case  of  another  Scott 
finding  the  forgotten  manuscript  of  the  be 
ginning  of  Waverley,  but  it  was  an  auspicious 
turning  point  in  the  life  of  Holmes  the 
author,  and  in  time  it  gave  to  America 
what  bids  fair  to  remain  for  a  considerable 
period  one  of  its  prose  classics.  The  new 
Autocrat  was  no  longer  a  youth  of  premature 
genius,  but  a  mellowed  man  of  nearly  fifty, 
whose  experience  had  given  him  insight 
into  life  and  character,  yet  had  increased 
rather  than  diminished  his  native  geniality 
and  tenderness  of  spirit.  He  could  now  be 
wise  as  well  as  humorous,  he  could  display  a 
mild  skill  in  creating  characters,  he  could  go 
his  own  way  and  gait — certain  that  he  had 
begun  adequately  to  express  his  own  genius 


154     GREAT  AMERICAN  WRITERS 

and  to  make  an  individual  appeal  to  the 
public  heart. 

The  Autocrat  of  the  Breakfast  Table  appeared 
as  a  book  in  1858,  and  The  Professor  at  the 
Breakfast  Table  in  1860.  The  increased 
element  of  fiction  in  the  second  and  less 
notable  volume  served  to  introduce  the  now 
fairly  active  writer  to  an  expectant  public  as 
a  novelist.  Elsie  Venner,  his  first  and  best 
novel,  appeared  in  1861,  and  the  same  year 
he  issued  another  collection  of  poems.  The 
novel  showed  that  its  author  had  abandoned 
his  true  province,  yet,  as  not  infrequently 
happens,  it  proved  that  the  work  of  a  man  of 
real  genius  is  likely  to  be  memorable  for  one 
reason  or  another,  no  matter  what  the  field 
of  his  activity.  Holmes  might  not  have  the 
narrative  skill  requisite  to  the  production 
of  fiction  of  the  first  order,  but  he  was  still 
able  to  use  his  gifts  as  an  observer,  he  was 
still  a  kindly  humorist,  and  he  had  chosen 
a  subject  congenial  to  a  physician  with  a 
scientific  bent.  Some  have  found  the  story 
of  his  snake-like  heroine  too  repulsive,  but 
even  these  persons  must  have  enjoyed  his 
pictures  of  New  England  village  life.  Later 
realists  have  given  us  more  carefully  finished 
pictures,  but  Holmes  has  in  Elsie  Vernier 
one  great  advantage  over  most  of  his  modern 
rivals.  The  queer  uncanniness  of  his  book 


THE  NEW  ENGLAND  POETS      155 

gives  it  a  unique  and  memorable  quality 
that  has,  as  it  were,  nitched  it  in  the  popular 
mind.  Most  realistic  work,  no  matter  how 
perfect,  tends  to  take  its  unremembered 
place  in  a  sort  of  photograph  album  of  fic 
tion  of  which  we  rarely  turn  the  leaves. 
In  such  an  album,  it  is  to  be  feared,  some 
of  us  have  put  away  Holmes's  other  novels, 
The  Guardian  Angel  of  1867  and  A  Mortal 
Antipathy  of  1885.  Yet  the  former  of  these, 
like  Elsie  Venner,  has  an  abnormal  theme, 
displays  its  author's  special  gifts,  and  is 
worth  reading  both  by  the  admirer  of 
Holmes  and  by  the  general  reader. 

The  books  of  Holmes's  old  age  doubtless 
helped  to  make  it  green  and  introduced  him 
to  new  readers,  while  enabling  him  to 
maintain  his  hold  upon  the  affections  of 
friends  he  had  made  in  his  youth  and  in 
his  prime.  There  is  no  need,  however,  to 
dwell  upon  them  here.  He  posed  as  the 
Poet  at  the  Breakfast  Table  and  he  was 
his  gracious  self.  Over  the  teacups,  he 
described  a  short  tour  in  Europe,  he  issued 
volumes  of  verses — often  memorial,  for  he 
was  surviving  his  friends — he  collected  his 
miscellaneous  essays,  he  tried  his  hand  at 
biography,  and  then,  full  of  years  and 
honors,  he  died  at  Boston  on  October  7, 
1894,  the  most  distinguished  and  represen- 


156      GREAT  AMERICAN  WRITERS 

tative  Bostonian  and  one  of  the  truest  and 
best  loved  Americans  of  his  long  day. 

As  has  been  sufficiently  indicated  his 
rank  as  a  poet  is  not  a  very  high  one,  but  his 
admirers  may  well  reply  that  it  makes 
little  difference  whether  so  delightful  a  poet, 
so  complete  a  master  of  familiar  verse,  is  great 
or  minor.  The  fame  of  the  author  of  The 
Last  Leaf,  of  Dorothy  Q,  of  The  Chambered 
Nautilus,  of  The  Deacon's  Masterpiece  is  as 
secure  in  the  hearts  of  chosen  readers  as 
that  of  any  of  his  American  contemporaries 
of  wider  art  and  deeper  emotional  appeal. 
Just  so,  there  are  people  who  read  Matthew 
Prior  oftener  than  they  do  Alfred  Tennyson, 
and  who  will  not  apologize  to  any  one  for 
their  preference.  But  Prior  is  not  by  any 
means  so  great  a  poet  as  Tennyson,  and 
Holmes  cannot  well  be  ranked  with  Long 
fellow  and  Whittier  and  Lowell,  or  even 
with  that  master  in  the  narrow  vein,  Edgar 
Allan  Poe.  What  matter!  He  wrote  the 
stanza 

"  And  if  I  should  live  to  be 
The  last  leaf  upon  the  tree. 

In  the  spring, 

Let  them  smile  as  I  do  now, 
At  the  old  forsaken  bough 
Where  I  cling." 

He  wrote  also 


THE  NEW  ENGLAND  POETS      157 

"  Grandmother's  mother:  her  age  I  guess, 
Thirteen  summers,  or  something  less; 
Girlish  bust,  but  womanly  air; 
Smooth,  square  forehead  with  uprolled  hair; 
Lips  that  lover  has  never  kissed; 
Taper  fingers  and  slender  wrist; 
Hanging  sleeves  of  stiff  brocade; 
So  they  painted  the  little  maid." 

He  wrote  also  in  higher  mood 

"  Build  thee  more  stately  mansions,  O  my  soul, 
As  the  swift  seasons  roll! 
Leave  thy  low- vaulted  past! 
Let  each  new  temple,  nobler  than  the  last, 
Shut  thee  from  heaven  with  a  dome  more  vast, 

Till  thou  at  length  art  free, 
Leaving  thine  outgrown  shell  by  life's  unrest 
ing  sea." 

The  future  will  winnow  Holmes's  prose  as 
carefully  as  it  will  his  verses,  and  it  may  be 
that  only  a  small  collection  of  choice  passages 
— reduced  essays  let  us  call  them — will  be 
left.  Certainly  most  of  his  fairly  numerous 
volumes  of  prose  will  stand  for  longer  and 
longer  periods  unopened  on  our  shelves, 
and  perhaps  they  will  steadily  move  up  to 
higher  shelves.  But  somehow  one  does  not 
like  to  think  of  The  Autocrat  of  the  Break 
fast  Table  and  Elsie  Venner,  at  least  of  the 
original  "  Autocrat,"  undergoing  this  upward 
migration.  Poets  may  with  advantage  strike 


158     GREAT  AMERICAN  WRITERS 

the  stars  with  their  sublime  foreheads,  but 
woe  to  the  volume  that  almost  strikes  the 
ceiling.  May  Holmes  long  remain  an  Auto 
crat  of  the  Library  Table. 

The  fourth  of  the  chief  poets  of  New  Eng 
land,  James  Russell  Lowell,  was  born  at 
Cambridge  on  February  £2,  1819,  nearly  ten 
years  after  Holmes.  He  too  was  of  Brahmin 
stock  and  thoroughly  representative  of  Har 
vard — in  the  matter  of  scholarship  and  wide 
culture  more  representative  than  Holmes. 
He  graduated  in  1838  after  some  escapades, 
and  in  his  class  poem  he  gave  early  proof 
of  his  satiric  powers.  He  was  admitted  to  the 
bar  but  showed  no  signs  of  desiring  to  prac 
tise  law,  the  writing  of  verses  being  a  more 
delightful  occupation,  one  followed  by  the 
charming  girl  Maria  White,  to  whom  he  was 
finally  married  in  1844.  It  is  needless  to  name 
or  discuss  his  first  volumes  of  poetry,  which 
showed  the  influence  of  Keats,  or  to  dwell 
upon  his  attempt  to  start  a  magazine,  or  to 
comment  upon  his  interesting  beginnings  as 
a  prose  critic.  Many  of  the  best  character 
istics  of  the  mature  man  were  observable 
in  the  attractive  young  poet,  but  he  was  per 
haps  somewhat  slow  in  finding  himself. 
Fortunately  he  never  gave  himself  completely 
over  to  Transcendentalism,  although  im 
pelled  in  that  direction  by  his  idealistic  wife. 


THE  NEW  ENGLAND  POETS      159 

She  stimulated  his  love  of  freedom,  a  fact 
not  without  its  influence  upon  his  later  career, 
when  both  in  prose  and  in  verse  he  voiced 
the  best  political  aspirations  of  his  country 
men.  Important  also  in  this  respect  was  his 
service  on  an  anti-slavery  paper  in  Phila 
delphia,  and  even  if  his  early  reviews,  poems, 
and  political  articles  are  of  but  the  very 
slightest  value  to-day,  they  may  be  regarded 
as  more  than  the  merely  normal  sources  of 
income  for  a  struggling  man  of  letters. 
They  helped  to  make  Lowell  the  most  broadly 
accomplished  and  one  of  the  most  practi 
cally  influential  of  American  writers. 

The  Lowell  we  know  first  emerges  in  his 
racy  dialect  poems  known  as  The  Biglow 
Papers,  which  began  in  the  Boston  Courier 
in  June  1846.  In  1848  the  first  series  of  these 
humorous  and  satiric  poems,  the  best  of 
their  kind  in  American  literature,  appeared 
in  book  form;  the  second  series  followed 
during  the  Civil  War  and,  although  in  some 
respects  less  successful  than  the  series  deal 
ing  with  politics  during  the  war  with  Mexico, 
was  worthy  of  its  author's  reputation  and 
of  the  great  crisis  that  called  it  forth.  In 
the  first  series  Lowell's  strictly  creative 
genus  is  probably  seen  at  its  height.  Else 
where  in  his  verse  he  is  in  continual  danger  of 
suggesting  the  work  or  the  manner  of  other 


160     GREAT  AMERICAN  WRITERS 

poets;  here  he  is  to  all  intents  and  purposes 
an  original  master.  His  rustics  are  real  hu 
man  beings  who  discuss  contemporary  poli 
tics  in  the  best  Yankee  dialect.  For  wit  and 
wisdom,  for  keen  political  intelligence,  for 
honest  hatred  of  shams  and  deep  sympathy 
with  what  is  best  in  life,  for  satiric  power  that 
can  not  merely  sting  and  lash  but  fairly  sweep 
away,  these  poems  are  unique  and  worthy  of 
high  praise.  Their  appeal  to-day  is  probably 
limited  in  the  main  to  readers  who  know 
something  of  American  history,  and  the 
satirist  who  now  desires  to  influence  public 
opinion  is  almost  certain  to  employ  prose 
and  to  dispense  with  Lowell's  learning;  but 
then  the  modern  satirist  is  not  likely  to  come 
as  near  as  Lowell  did  to  producing  a  classic. 
The  year  of  the  first  series  of  The  Biglow 
Papers  also  saw  the  publication  of  two  of 
Lowell's  most  popular  and  sustained  poems, 
The  Vision  of  Sir  Launfal  and  A  Fable  for 
Critics.  Neither  is  a  masterpiece,  but  both 
furnish  good  evidence  of  his  versatility  and 
power.  The  former  has  retained  its  popu 
larity  better  than  the  latter,  a  fact  which 
is  not  surprising  since  the  one  poem  is  a  senti 
mental  and  highly  moral  bit  of  modernized 
Arthurian  romance  introduced  by  some 
charming  verses  in  praise  of  June,  while 
the  other  is  a  satire  which  concerns  itself  in 


THE  NEW  ENGLAND  POETS       161 

part  with  small  and  long-forgotten  authors. 
Yet  the  exuberant  genius  of  Lowell  is  really 
more  manifest  in  the  less  remembered  poem, 
which  is  one  of  the  best  of  its  kind.  In  some 
respects,  of  course,  A  Fable  for  Critics  is 
derivative;  it  plainly  belongs  to  a  group  of 
anapsestic  jeux  d'esprit,  of  which  the  earliest 
important  example  is  Suckling's  Session  of 
the  Poets.  But  Lowell's  overflowing  humor 
was  his  own,  and  so  was  his  generous  praise 
of  all  the  contemporaries  for  whose  produc 
tions  he  could  feel  any  genuine  admiration. 
Perhaps  he  was  too  generous,  but  that  is  a 
good  fault.  He  certainly  displayed  modera 
tion  in  his  satire  upon  the  poor  poets  of  the 
period,  who  were  wretched  enough  to  justify 
the  indignation  of  a  Dryden  and  the  spleen 
of  a  Pope,  as  any  one  may  convince  himself 
who  will  examine  carefully  the  Reverend 
Rufus  Wilmot  Gris wold's  portentous  anthol 
ogy  of  1842  entitled  Poets  and  Poetry  of 
America.  Both  this  volume  and  Lowell's 
half -panegyrical,  half -satiric  poem  are  emi 
nently  representative  of  the  period  and  of  the 
democracy  that  produced  them.  The  period 
swarmed  with  mediocre  writers  which  the 
democracy  knew  no  better  than  to  tolerate. 
Yet,  after  all,  who  that  has  seen  a  democracy 
roused  to  blind  anger  will  wish  to  see  it  any 
thing  but  kindly — even  to  bad  poets.  A 


162      GREAT  AMERICAN  WRITERS 

Fable  for  Critics  is  a  better  model  for  our  fu 
ture  satirists  than  The  Dunciad. 

Lowell  entered  the  third  decade  of  his  life 
with  a  reputation  which  a  more  strictly 
professional  writer  would  easily  and  speedily 
have  enhanced.  That  he  did  not  greatly  in 
crease  it  for  some  years  seems  to  have  been 
due  in  part  to  his  domestic  circumstances. 
His  wife  was  frail,  they  had  lost  children, 
and  a  change  of  scene  seemed  needed.  In 
July,  1851  they  sailed  to  Italy  and  remained 
abroad  fifteen  months,  the  visit  being  of 
great  service  to  a  man  whose  mind  was  so 
open  to  impressions  and  whose  love  of  cul 
ture  was  so  genuine.  A  year  after  his  return 
his  wife  died,  and  he  was  left  to  care  for  a 
little  daughter.  He  wrote  some  verse  and 
prose  full  of  a  true  feeling  for  nature,  and  he 
lectured  on  poetry  so  acceptably  that  he  was 
offered  the  chair  at  Harvard  that  Long 
fellow  had  resigned.  After  another  journey 
to  Europe  he  entered  with  success  upon  his 
professional  duties,  in  which  he  displayed 
great  geniality  as  a  teacher  and  broad 
attainments  as  a  scholar.  In  1857  he  made 
a  fortunate  second  marriage  and  as  editor 
of  The  Atlantic  Monthly  put  that  periodical 
upon  the  path  of  success.  After  four  years 
the  Monthly  passed  into  other  hands,  and 
Lowell  was  free  to  express  his  thoughts  and 


THE  NEW  ENGLAND  POETS      163 

feelings  about  the  great  civil  struggle  that 
had  begun.  The  second  series  of  the  Biglow 
Papers  has  been  mentioned,  but  undoubtedly 
his  greatest  poem  of  the  period  is  the  Com 
memoration  Ode  recited  in  1865  at  the  cere 
monies  at  Harvard  in  honor  of  the  alumni 
that  had  fallen  in  the  war.  This  and  Lowell's 
other  odes,  particularly  that  written  ten 
years  later  for  the  hundredth  anniversary 
of  Washington's  taking  command  of  the 
American  army,  constitute  probably  the  chief 
basis  for  the  admiration  of  those  readers 
—  and  there  are  such — who  regard  Lowell 
as  the  best  of  American  poets.  They  are 
indeed  poems  of  high  excellence  such  as  none 
but  a  true  poet  of  trained  powers  could  have 
composed,  and  they  make,  in  passages,  a 
splendid  appeal  to  American  patriotism. 
They  are  diffuse,  however,  and,  in  the  opin 
ion  of  some,  fall  below  Lowell's  greatest 
models  in  perfect  flawlessness  of  poetic  art, 
being  in  some  respects  too  subtle  and  un- 
spontaneous.  Indeed,  it  is  difficult  not  to 
feel  that  Lowell's  later  poems,  as  one  reads 
them  in  their  collected  form,  especially  in 
the  collections  of  1868  and  1888,  fall  short 
in  range,  copiousness,  and  originality  of 
genius,  of  what  might  have  been  expected 
of  a  poet  endowed  with  his  powers,  ideals, 
and  opportunities.  He  never  quite  touches 


164      GREAT  AMERICAN  WRITERS 

the  heart  as  Longfellow  does;  he  has  not  the 
individual  quality  so  notable  in  Emerson, 
Poe,  and  Whitman.  But  he  was  the  most 
cultured  of  American  poets,  and  in  the  Biglow 
Papers  a  master  in  his  way. 

Meanwhile  Lowell  had  been  joint-editor 
with  Professor  Charles  Eliot  Norton  of  the 
old  North  American  Review  and  had  con 
tributed  to  it  some  noteworthy  political  and 
literary  articles.  He  also  showed  his  genius 
as  a  true  essayist  in  such  pieces  as  My  Gar 
den  Acquaintance  and  On  a  Certain  Conde 
scension  in  Foreigners.  His  collected  papers, 
Among  My  Books  of  1870  and  My  Study 
Windows  of  1871,  proved  him  to  be  easily  the 
most  scholarly  and  readable  of  American 
critics.  It  was  no  great  task  to  eclipse  his 
predecessors,  save  Poe,  and  his  contempora 
ries,  but  the  praise  just  given  him  holds  true 
of  him  even  after  the  lapse  of  forty  years  and 
after  a  marked  improvement  in  the  general 
quality  of  our  criticism.  Indeed  by  1870, 
the  year  of  the  publication  of  that  over 
rated  poem  The  Cathedral  inspired  by  the 
beautiful  edifice  at  Chartres,  Lowell  had  made 
himself  the  greatest  of  American  men  of 
letters,  the  writer  one  naturally  puts  in 
rivalry  with  Matthew  Arnold.  We  need 
not  compare  them  here,  but  may  venture 
the  remark  that,  good  as  Lowell  is  in  such 


THE  NEW  ENGLAND  POETS      165 

critical  essays  as  those  on  Chaucer  and 
Dryden,  he  is  not  the  master  of  a  critical 
method  which  can  be  more  or  less  applied 
by  others.  His  chief  faults  as  a  critic  are  per 
haps  due  in  large  measure  to  two  character 
istics  that  make  him  delightful  as  a  writer — 
his  independence  and  his  ebullient  humor. 

In  1872  Lowell  gave  up  his  professorship 
at  Harvard  and  went  abroad  for  two  years. 
On  his  return  he  filled  his  chair  once  more  and 
continued  to  publish  essays  and  poems,  but 
he  also  took  some  practical  interest  in  poli 
tics,  his  indignation  having  been  aroused  by 
the  scandals  of  Grant's  second  administra 
tion.  In  1877  he  was  appointed  minister  to 
Spain  and  in  1880  was  advanced  to  the  Eng 
lish  mission,  which  he  filled  until  1885. 
No  American  has  ever  more  worthily  repre 
sented  his  country  abroad,  although  it  must 
be  added  that  no  very  important  diplo 
matic  complications  arose  during  his  period 
of  service.  He  was  especially  honored  in 
Great  Britain,  where  he  delivered  some  ad 
mirable  memorial  addresses  on  great  writers, 
as  well  as  a  most  thoughtful  discourse  on 
Democracy  (Birmingham,  October  6,  1884), 
which  represents  him  at  his  highest  as  a 
patriotic  publicist.  He  returned  shortly 
after  to  America,  saddened  by  the  death 
of  his  second  wife.  During  the  years  that 


166      GREAT  AMERICAN  WRITERS 

elapsed  before  his  own  death  on  August  12, 
1891  he  superintended  a  revised  edition  of 
his  writings,  wrote  a  few  articles  and  poems, 
and  delivered  addresses,  that  on  The  Place 
of  the  Independent  in  Politics  being  note 
worthy.  He  had  become  more  than  a  great 
man  of  letters  of  whose  international  fame 
his  countrymen  were  proud;  for  in  the  eyes 
of  many  he  was  the  greatest  force  for  civic 
enlightenment  and  inspiration  in  a  period 
when  political  reform  was  sorely  needed. 

As  one  looks  back  upon  Lowell's  career 
and  examines  his  works,  which  have  been 
increased  by  the  publication  of  many  pos 
thumous  volumes,  notably  by  his  excellent 
correspondence,  one  is  inclined  to  regard  him 
as  having  possessed  the  most  full,  varied,  and 
ripened  genius  of  any  American  man  of 
letters,  yet  one  must  acknowledge  that  in 
creative  literature  proper  his  achievement 
was  not  commensurate  with  his  genius.  He 
was  an  eminent  rather  than  a  great  poet,  and 
one  wonders  whether  this  is  not  true  of  his 
criticism  as  well.  As  a  brilliant,  stimulating, 
highly  individual  essayist,  who  dealt  in  large 
measure  with  literary  topics,  his  place  is 
supreme  in  American  literature  and  high 
in  the  literature  written  in  English.  He  must 
also  be  ranked  as  a  brilliant  letter-writer  and 
as  a  publicist  of  lofty  ideals  and  important 


THE  NEW  ENGLAND  POETS      167 

accomplishment.  But  whether  he  has  made 
or  is  making  either  an  intense  appeal  to  a 
limited  class  of  readers  or  a  strong,  broad 
appeal  to  a  large  public  is  a  question  the  an 
swer  to  which  is  not  easy  to  give.  His  high 
place  in  the  history  of  American  literature  is, 
however,  secure,  and  he  seems  sure  of  a 
select  public  happily  situated  between  the 
mass  of  readers  and  the  exponents  of  ultra- 
sophistication. 

Along  with  the  four  New  England  poets 
just  treated  and  with  Bryant,  Emerson,  and 
Poe,  who  are  dealt  with  in  other  chapters, 
a  number  of  minor  but  not  uninteresting 
poets  were  writing  in  America  during  the 
generation  that  preceded  the  war  between 
the  States.  One  of  these,  Nathaniel  Parker 
Willis,  has  been  already  mentioned.  Most  of 
his  poems  have  been  forgotten  save  the 
pathetic  lyric  entitled  Unseen  Spirits.  His 
fiction  and  his  gossiping  book  of  European 
experiences  Pencillings  by  the  Way  are  about 
as  dead  as  his  poetry,  and  the  details  of  his 
once  conspicuous  career  as  a  journalist  are 
almost  forgotten  save  when  he  comes  in 
contact  with  Poe.  Yet  there  are  many  more 
famous  careers  that  are  less  instructive  than 
his,  and  his  gossip  will  still  repay  readers 
interested  in  the  literature  and  society  of 
three  generations  ago. 


168      GREAT  AMERICAN  WRITERS 

Besides  Willis  one  may  also  recall  a 
writer  already  treated  in  another  connection, 
the  Southern  romancer,  William  Gilmore 
Simms,  who  wrote  several  volumes  of  poetry 
from  which  a  few  lyrics  have  found  their 
way  into  anthologies.  Another  poet,  who 
links  the  North  and  South,  is  Albert  Pike, 
author  of  Dixie,  an  interesting  example  of 
the  writer  of  too  precocious  talents  whose 
energies  are  dissipated  along  the  numerous 
lines  of  activity  a  democracy  offers  to  any 
young  man  of  unusual  capacity.  Pike  was 
one  of  the  earliest  of  all  American  poets  to 
fall  under  the  influence  of  Keats,  and  in  his 
early  Hymns  to  the  Gods  he  displayed  a  prom 
ise  that  aroused  high  expectations  destined 
to  remain  unfulfilled.  Almost  in  complete 
contrast  to  Pike  who,  though  New  England 
born,  became  a  frontier  lawyer  and  a  Con 
federate  general,  stands  Dr.  Thomas  William 
Parsons  of  Boston,  author  of  an  incomplete 
translation  of  the  Divine  Comedy,  often 
praised,  and  of  some  impressive  Lines  on  a 
Bust  of  Dante.  When  it  is  added  that  Dr. 
Parsons  was  a  practising  dentist,  one  per 
ceives  that,  while  democracy  may  dissipate 
some  men's  talents,  it  gives  to  other  men 
opportunities  for  culture  and  for  literary 
activity  which  would  rarely  come  to  them 
in  the  old  world.  But  interesting  though 


THE  HISTORIANS  169 

many  of  these  minor  poets  are,  especially 
some  of  the  Transcendentalists,  they  are, 
after  all,  of  but  slight  consequence  to  any 
class  of  readers  except  for  an  occasional 
poem  which  patriotic  and  never  too  exclusive 
anthologists  are  sure  to  have  gathered. 

CHAPTER  VIII 

THE  HISTORIANS 

THE  writing  of  history  in  America,  from  the 
very  nature  of  the  colonial  experiment,  dates 
practically  from  the  foundation  of  the  earliest 
English  plantations.  First  came  narratives 
of  contemporary  events  and  descriptions  of 
the  new  world,  that  is  to  say,  a  body  of  ma 
terials  for  history,  and  then  in  due  time  fol 
lowed  formal  historical  narratives.  Many  of 
the  colonial  historians,  such  as  Governor 
Bradford  of  Plymouth,  Governor  Winthrop 
of  Massachusetts  Bay,  and  Robert  Beverley 
of  Virginia,  are  interesting  both  as  men  and 
as  writers,  and  one,  Governor  Thomas  Hutch- 
inson  of  Massachusetts,  has  been  highly 
praised  for  the  scholarly  qualities  of  his  work. 
The  Revolution  and  the  formative  period 
that  followed  it  saw  both  the  making  and  the 
writing  of  much  history,  one  of  the  most  im 
portant  books  of  the  period  being  Chief  Jus- 


170      GREAT  AMERICAN  WRITERS 

tice  John  Marshall's  Life  of  Washington.  On 
the  whole,  however,  the  writing  of  history  and 
the  gathering  of  historical  materials  on  a 
large  scale  and  in  a  comparatively  modern 
way  may  be  said  to  have  begun  with  Jared 
Sparks  and  with  Washington  Irving. 

Sparks  (1789-1866)  was  a  Unitarian  clergy 
man,  a  professor  of  history,  and,  later,  presi 
dent  of  Harvard.  He  was  a  pioneer  searcher 
of  archives  and  rendered  great  service  by 
publishing  the  Diplomatic  Correspondence  of 
tJie  American  Revolution  and  the  works  of 
Washington  and  Franklin.  He  also  contrib 
uted  on  a  large  scale  to  American  biography, 
and  his  faults  as  an  editor  should  not  seri 
ously  diminish  the  gratitude  of  a  later  genera 
tion  for  his  immense  industry  in  gathering 
materials  and  in  stimulating  a  patriotic  in 
terest  in  history.  A  more  popular  and  im 
portant  historian  than  Sparks  was  George 
Bancroft  (1800-1891),  still  probably  the  best 
known  of  the  writers  who  have  devoted 
themselves  specifically  to  the  history  of  this 
country.  He  was  a  native  of  Massachusetts, 
a  graduate  of  Harvard,  and  one  of  the  first 
Americans  to  study  in  Germany.  The  initial 
volume  of  his  elaborate  History  of  the  United 
States  appeared  in  1834  and  won  favor,  largely 
through  its  full-flown  rhetorical  qualities  so 
suited  to  the  public  of  the  Jacksonian  period. 


THE  HISTORIANS  171 

Two  volumes  followed  after  moderate  inter 
vals,  and  then  the  historian  was  somewhat 
submerged  in  the  politician,  for  Bancroft 
served  as  Secretary  of  the  Navy  and  as  Min 
ister  to  England.  The  latter  post  afforded 
him  facilities  for  gathering  materials,  and  on 
his  return  to  America  he  resumed  the  pub 
lication  of  his  history.  Later  he  served  as 
Minister  to  Prussia  and  to  the  German  Em 
pire,  and  the  year  1874,  which  saw  his  re 
tirement  from  his  last  diplomatic  post,  saw 
also  the  publication  of  his  tenth  volume,  which 
carried  the  story  only  through  the  Revolution. 
In  the  forty  years  he  had  not  ceased  to  be  the 
rhetorician  and  philosopher  of  his  earlier 
volumes,  but  he  had  become  in  addition  a 
painstaking,  minute  historian  of  the  modern 
type.  In  1882  he  completed  his  work  by  two 
volumes  covering  the  formation  of  the  Consti 
tution,  and  then,  at  a  period  when  most  men 
would  have  thought  only  of  rest,  he  began  to 
revise  and  compress  his  truly  monumental 
history.  Both  in  the  fuller  and  in  the  reduced 
form  of  six  volumes  the  work  is  of  great  im 
portance  to  students,  and  its  author  should 
be  regarded  as  a  patriotic  public  servant  and 
a  historical  student  of  immense  industry  and 
marked  ability;  but  he  was  not  a  great  writer, 
and,  although  he  will  continue  to  be  much 
more  famous  than  rivals  like  the  accurate 


172     GREAT  AMERICAN  WRITERS 

and  partisan  Richard  Hildreth,  or  historians 
with  more  limited  fields,  such  as  Judge 
Gayarre,  the  scholarly  historian  of  Louisiana, 
he  is  not  likely  to  be  read  in  extenso  either  for 
pleasure  or  for  edification  by  persons  who 
do  not  do  their  reading  to  order. 

This  means  that  Bancroft  was  not  a  true 
man  of  letters,  an  attractive  writer  like  the 
late  John  Fiske,  who,  after  he  turned  from 
philosophy,  made  the  history  of  America 
from  its  discovery  to  the  beginnings  of  fed 
eral  government  interesting  to  thousands  of 
readers.  And  even  on  the  side  of  research 
Bancroft  has  been  followed  by  specialists  in 
colonial  history  who  have  made  good  use  of 
their  advantages  of  increased  materials  and 
improved  methods.  The  history  of  the  re 
public  since  the  adoption  of  the  Constitution 
has  also  been  treated  in  elaborate  works  cov 
ering  larger  and  smaller  periods.  Some  of 
these  historians,  for  example  Henry  Adams, 
James  Schouler,  John  Bach  McMaster,  and 
James  Ford  Rhodes,  have  won  deservedly 
high  reputations,  and  the  development  of  the 
spirit  of  historical  research  throughout  the 
country  by  means  of  active  historical  soci 
eties  and  strong  university  departments  of 
history,  as  well  as  various  instrumentalities 
for  the  preservation  of  archives,  state  and 
national,  has  been  noteworthy  since  the  Civil 


THE  HISTORIANS  173 

War.  On  the  whole,  however,  the  American 
historians  who  have  dealt  with  the  history  of 
their  own  country,  with  the  exception  of 
Parkman,  have  tended  to  be  more  eminent 
as  exponents  of  the  scientific  study  and  pres 
entation  of  history  than  as  exponents  of  the 
art  of  historical  narration. 

By  common  consent  the  three  greatest 
American  masters  of  the  art  of  historical  nar 
ration  are  three  natives  of  Massachusetts, — 
Prescott,  Motley,  and  Parkman.  That  they 
and  many  other  American  historians  should 
have  done  their  work  near  the  libraries  of 
Cambridge  and  Boston  is  no  cause  for  sur 
prise,  when  one  remembers  that  New  Eng 
land  during  their  prime  was  the  centre  of 
American  literature,  and  that  it  was  the  most 
favored  section  of  the  country  with  respect 
to  accumulated  wealth  and  culture.  It  may 
be  remarked,  however  that  perhaps  the  most 
famous  of  the  American  scholars  who  have 
done  their  work  in  the  field  of  European 
history,  Henry  Charles  Lea,  was  a  citizen  of 
a  city  that  vies  with  Boston  as  a  seat  of 
wealth  and  long-established  culture,  —  Phila 
delphia. 

The  first  of  the  important  successors  of 
Irving  in  the  writing  of  elaborate  works  deal 
ing  with  large  European  themes,  particularly 
such  themes  as  bore  upon  the  early  history 


174      GREAT  AMERICAN  WRITERS 

of  the  new  world,  was  William  Hickling  Pres- 
cott  (1796-1859),  the  historian  of  the  reign 
of  Ferdinand  and  Isabella  and  of  the  con 
quests  of  Mexico  and  Peru.  He  was  a  native 
of  Salem  and  a  graduate  of  Harvard,  who 
suffered  in  early  manhood  an  accident  which 
nearly  deprived  him  of  sight.  This  did  not 
quench  the  ambition  of  emulating  Gibbon  as 
a  historian  on  a  grand  scale.  He  was  for 
tunately  able  to  secure  books  and  amanu 
enses,  and  to  accumulate  and  arrange  great 
masses  of  notes,  which  he  converted  into  nar 
ratives  well  ordered  and  couched  in  a  digni 
fied  and  attractive  style.  The  difficulties 
under  which  he  labored  were  immense,  but 
his  indomitable  will,  his  high  ambitions,  and 
his  exceptional  endowments  as  a  scholar  and 
writer  enabled  him  to  win  for  himself  an 
international  reputation,  which,  although  it 
has  suffered  through  causes  no  one  could 
have  foreseen,  is  still  enviable.  His  attempts 
in  the  field  of  biography  and  literary  criti 
cism  prove  him  to  have  been  a  man  of  letters 
in  the  true  sense  of  the  phrase,  but  they  do 
little  to-day  to  preserve  his  memory.  He  lives 
as  one  of  the  most  readable  of  descriptive 
historians. 

His  first  historical  work  of  consequence  was 
the  three  volumes  devoted  to  the  period  of 
Ferdinand  and  Isabella,  which  appeared  in 


THE  HISTORIANS  175 

1837.  It  was  so  favorably  received  that 
Prescott  was  encouraged  to  essay  another 
theme,  one  even  more  picturesque  as  well  as 
more  definitely  and  extensively  connected 
with  America.  Six  years  later,  in  1843,  the 
new  work,  the  History  of  the  Conquest  of 
Mexico,  brought  Prescott  to  the  zenith  of  his 
fame.  It  is  his  best  book  as  a  brilliant  his 
torical  narrative,  but  it  has  suffered  greatly 
as  a  source  of  reliable  information  owing  to 
the  fact  that  he  was  forced  to  depend  upon 
sources  colored  by  the  imagination  of  the 
Spanish  conquerors  and  at  variance  with  con 
ceptions  of  the  state  of  Mexican  development 
formed  by  modern  archaeologists  and  anthro 
pologists  as  the  result  of  their  researches. 
Four  years  later  came  the  companion  work, 
the  almost  equally  interesting  History  of  the 
Conquest  of  Peru.  Then  Prescott  girded 
himself  to  a  still  greater  task,  his  History  of 
the  Reign  of  Philip  II,  which  was  left  unfin 
ished,  only  three  volumes  having  appeared 
during  his  life. 

Apart  from  the  fact  that  more  than  any  of 
his  rivals  Prescott  has  suffered  from  the  in 
validating  of  his  materials  and  his  views,  it 
may  be  doubted  whether  he  was  great  as  a 
historian  in  two  very  important  respects,  — 
in  his  insight  into  character  and  in  his  inter 
est  in  institutions  and  politics.  In  his  [deals 


176      GREAT  AMERICAN  WRITERS 

of  scholarly  accuracy  and  in  his  energy  and 
courage  he  need  fear  no  comparisons,  nor 
has  any  other  American  historian  been  more 
gifted  with  a  sense  for  the  picturesque  and 
epic  elements  in  history.  It  cannot  be  proved 
that  he  was  a  better  artist  than  Motley  or 
Parkman — indeed  partisans  of  the  last  named 
would  probably  smile  at  the  suggestion  that 
such  a  view  could  be  held.  Yet  it  might  be 
contended  by  some  readers  with  a  taste  for 
classical  balance  and  perfection  of  form  and 
style  that  Prescott  combines  dignity,  ease, 
interest,  and  a  sense  of  proportion  more 
completely  than  almost  any  other  writer  of 
his  class.  If  he  had  been  as  fortunate  as  a 
scholar  as  he  was  successful  as  an  artist,  he 
would  seem  to  many  to  be  the  greatest  of 
American  historians.  As  it  is  he  is  well 
worthy  to  rank  among  great  modern  writers 
of  prose. 

John  Lothrop  Motley,  the  historian  of  the 
Dutch  Republic,  was  born  in  1814  in  Dor 
chester,  Massachusetts,  now  a  part  of  the 
city  of  Boston,  and  died  near  Dorchester, 
England,  in  1877.  He  was  well  connected, 
his  circumstances  favored  his  adopting  the 
life  of  a  scholar  and  writer  to  which  his  tastes 
inclined  him,  and  he  received  the  best  educa 
tion  America  and  Europe  could  afford.  He 
attended  a  school  of  which  the  historian  Ban- 


THE  HISTORIANS  177 

croft  was  joint-principal,  he  graduated  from 
Harvard,  and  then  he  heard  lectures  at  Berlin 
and  Gottingen,  becoming  the  warm  personal 
friend  of  the  man  afterwards  famous  as  Prince 
Bismarck.  He  was  handsome  and  a  social 
favorite,  but,  despite  all  other  allurements,  he 
remained  true  to  his  love  of  books  and  his 
literary  ambitions.  After  an  early  marriage 
to  a  sister  of  the  poet  Park  Benjamin,  he 
tried  his  hand  at  a  story,  Morton's  Hope, 
which  proved  unsuccessful.  Another  work  of 
fiction,  the  colonial  romance,  Merry  Mount, 
was  kept  in  manuscript  until  1849,  when  it, 
too,  failed  on  publication.  Meanwhile  the 
rebuffed  but  not  disheartened  author  had  had 
his  first  experience  of  diplomatic  life  as  sec 
retary  for  a  short  time  of  the  legation  at 
St.  Petersburg,  had  dabbled  in  Massachusetts 
politics,  and  had  done  some  writing  for  the 
North  American  Review.  He  had  also  be 
come  interested  in  Dutch  history,  and  with 
Prescott's  approval  he  chose  an  episode  of 
that  reign  of  Philip  II  which  occupied  the 
last  years  of  the  older  historian.  Finding 
materials  difficult  to  obtain  in  America  he 
sailed  for  Europe  in  1851. 

Five  years  later  he  issued  at  his  own  ex 
pense  in  London — for  Murray  refused  the 
work — his  Rise  of  the  Dutch  Republic,  the 
success  of  which  was  extraordinary  both  with 


178      GREAT  AMERICAN  WRITERS 

scholars  and  with  the  public.  Then  he  took 
up  the  narrative  at  1584  and  in  1860  pub 
lished  the  first  two  volumes  of  his  History  of 
the  United  Netherlands,  much  of  the  study  for 
which  had  been  done  at  the  Hague,  where 
he  was  cordially  assisted  by  Dutch  scholars. 
He  was  not  so  absorbed,  however,  in  the  early 
history  of  an  alien  people  as  to  be  oblivious 
to  the  great  events  taking  place  in  his  own 
country.  He  wrote  letters  to  the  Times  which 
helped  to  influence  English  opinion  in  favor 
of  the  Union,  he  returned  to  America  for  a 
short  period,  and  he  accepted  and  filled 
until  1867  the  mission  to  Austria,  thus  rank 
ing  himself  with  Irving,  Bancroft,  and  others 
among  our  historian-diplomatists.  After  re 
signing  his  post  he  went  to  London,  and  in 
1869  published  the  two  remaining  volumes 
of  the  United  Netherlands,  which  carry  the 
narrative  to  1609.  Then  after  a  short  visit 
to  the  country  from  which  he  had  become 
practically  an  honored  exile,  he  returned  to 
London  as  Minister  to  England,  only  to  be 
suddenly  recalled  the  next  year  in  a  way  which 
aroused  resentment  in  his  friends.  Study  and 
travel  brought  consolation,  however,  and  in 
1874  he  issued  The  Life  and  Death  of  John  of 
Barneveld.  Three  years  later  he  died  in  Eng 
land,  where  his  daughters  lived,  and  where  he 
himself  was  more  at  home  than  in  America. 


THE  HISTORIANS  179 

Motley  the  man  is  interesting,  and  his 
letters,  which  were  edited  by  his  friend 
George  William  Curtis  (1824-1892),  himself 
one  of  the  best  essayists  and  publicists  America 
has  produced,  are  thoroughly  entertaining, 
although  perhaps  making  a  greater  appeal  to 
English  readers  than  to  American.  But  it  is 
almost  entirely  as  a  historian  that  he  im 
presses  posterity  and  that  he  holds  his  place 
in  American  literature.  As  compared  with 
Prescott  he  is  more  fortunate  in  that  his  ma 
terials  have  worn  better,  and  he  will  seem  to 
many  readers  to  be  more  brilliant  and  more 
inspiring  through  his  manifest  love  of  lib 
erty;  yet  it  may  wall  be  questioned  whether 
he  is  on  the  whole  so  consummate  an  artist 
in  the  construction  of  his  books  as  was  the 
elder  historian.  As  compared  with  Parkman, 
he  has  not  the  advantage  of  a  theme  touch 
ing  so  directly  the  fortunes  of  America,  and 
in  some  respects  he  does  not  bear  so  well  the 
scrutiny  of  minute  scholars;  yet  he  has  the 
advantages  that  flow  from  a  compact,  dra 
matic,  and  inspiring  theme,  he  seldom  seems 
monotonous,  he  often  rises  to  genuine  elo 
quence.  He  is  an  extraordinarily  skilful 
painter  of  portraits;  whether  or  not  he  was 
always  true  to  nature,  he  was  always  im 
pressive  in  his  drawing  and  in  his  use  of  the 
most  effective  colors.  Perhaps  he  was  not 


180     GREAT  AMERICAN  WRITERS 

altogether  a  great  stylist,  or  at  least  an  im 
peccable  one,  but  his  writing  so  answered  the 
varying  needs  of  his  narrative  as  well  as  his 
own  intellectual  and  spiritual  moods,  that  it 
seems  supererogatory  to  question  his  high 
place  as  a  writer  of  prose.  Perhaps  his  chief 
fault  as  a  historian  is  the  chief  fault  of  that 
school  of  Macaulay  and  Michelet  to  which  he 
belonged,  the  fault  of  partisanship  springing 
from  an  excess  of  emotions  commendable 
when  held  in  check.  Motley  was  not  by 
temperament  or  training  very  well  qualified 
to  be  impartial  toward  Calvinists  or  Span 
iards.  He  was  specially  qualified  to  celebrate 
with  stirring  eloquence  the  heroic  achieve 
ments  of  a  people  and  a  leader  inspired  with 
his  own  overmastering  passion,  the  love  of 
liberty.  Eloquence,  liberal  aspirations,  com 
mand  of  the  bolder  and  larger  elements  of 
the  art  of  historical  narration — these  are  the 
salient  features  of  Motley  the  historian. 
Brilliant  descriptive  powers,  a  keen  sense  for 
social  and  political  life,  and  cosmopolitan 
experience — these  are  what  we  chiefly  re 
member  when  we  think  of  Motley  the  diplo 
matist  and  correspondent.  His  books  have 
become  classics  in  then*  kind,  and  it  is  scarcely 
profitable  to  ask  whether,  on  the  whole,  they 
are  superior  or  inferior  to  the  works  of  the 
two  American  historians  with  whom  one  nat 
urally  compares  him. 


THE  HISTORIANS  181 

Francis  Parkman  of  Boston,  who  was  born 
in  1823  and  died  seventy  years  later,  was  the 
youngest  of  our  most  distinguished  group  of 
historians,  and  hence  the  one  most  markedly 
affected  by  modern  ideals  of  scholarship. 
Probably  his  minute,  painstaking  accuracy, 
which  he  managed  to  combine  with  an  ex 
cellent  style  and  exceptional  powers  of  de 
scription  and  construction,  has  done  much 
to  prompt  latter-day  students  and  readers  of 
history  to  give  him  the  palm  over  his  rivals. 
His  subject,  too,  lying  as  it  does  to  the  north 
and  west  and  not  to  the  south  of  what  is  now 
the  United  States,  seems,  despite  its  close 
connection  with  the  old  world  and  with  an 
un-English  civilization,  more  completely  Am 
erican  than  the  themes  of  Prescott  and  Mot 
ley,  and  gives  Parkman  a  patriotic  appeal. 
This  patriotic  appeal  links  him  with  the  school 
of  historians  who  have  treated  the  history  of 
the  United  States  proper,  and  doubtless  ex 
plains  in  part  the  attraction  he  exerts  upon 
many  readers;  for  since  the  success  of  the 
Union  cause  in  the  Civil  War  a  noticeable 
national  self-consciousness  has  exhibited  it 
self  both  in  the  spirit  and  substance  of  Amer 
ican  books  and  in  the  tastes  of  American 
readers. 

Parkman  was  a  delicate  boy  and  hence  was 
kept  much  in  the  country,  a  fact  which  doubt- 


182      GREAT  AMERICAN  WRITERS 

less  accounts  in  part  for  that  love  of  nature 
and  of  life  in  the  wild  which  he  never  lost 
and  from  which  his  books  profited  greatly. 
He  was  also  enabled,  before  he  graduated 
from  Harvard,  to  travel  in  Europe,  and  after 
graduation  he  studied  law  but  did  not  prac 
tise.  In  1846  he  set  out  from  St.  Louis  to 
explore  the  then  far  west,  the  region  of  the 
Rockies.  He  lived  for  some  months  among 
Indian  tribes,  and  learned  much  about  them 
and  about  the  ways  of  trappers.  He  em 
bodied  his  experiences  in  magazine  articles 
which  in  1847  he  made  into  his  first  book, 
The  Oregon  Trail.  This  remains  a  most  read 
able  and  popular  narrative  of  adventure  and 
exploration,  which  gives  information  to  ma 
ture  students  with  regard  to  the  west  as  it 
was  on  the  point  of  passing  from  the  control 
of  the  savage  to  that  of  civilized  man.  It 
is  also  read  in  schools  as  an  English  prose 
classic,  and  it  deserves  the  honor  on  account 
of  its  attractive  style,  its  powers  of  descrip 
tion  and  straightforward  narration,  its  sym 
pathy  with  nature  and  uncramped  men,  and 
its  historical  importance.  It  was  an  extraor 
dinarily  good  first  book,  and  foreshadowed 
its  author's  subsequent  success  as  a  pictur 
esque  historian  who  nevertheless  was  careful 
of  his  facts. 

Parkman's  health  was  much  injured  by 


THE  HISTORIANS  183 

exposure  during  his  sojourn  in  the  west,  and 
he  never  recovered.  He  was  no  more  daunted, 
however,  than  Fresco tt  had  been,  and  the 
annals  of  literature  contain  little  or  nothing 
more  heroic  than  his  devotion  to  his  great 
task.  For  some  years  he  could  not  work  at 
all,  and  often  during  his  working  periods  he 
could  read  or  write  only  for  a  few  minutes 
together.  He  was  sufficiently  well  off  to 
have  a  large  amount  of  copying  of  documents 
done  for  him,  and  to  secure  the  reading  of  these 
and  of  all  necessary  books  on  his  chosen 
theme, — the  struggle  of  France  and  Great 
Britain  for  the  control  of  the  major  portion 
of  North  America.  He  was  also  able  to  make 
extensive  journeys  both  for  the  personal  con 
sultation  of  archives  and  for  the  acquisition 
of  topographical  information.  He  studied 
nature,  too,  and  he  made  the  most  of  the  early 
experiences  that  had  so  hampered  him  by 
undermining  his  health.  The  result  was  a 
series  of  eleven  volumes  dealing  with  a  sub 
ject  which,  as  we  have  seen,  was  as  important 
to  the  understanding  of  the  development  of 
America,  as  it  was  attractive  to  lovers  of  old- 
world  romance  and  of  new-world  freshness 
and  untrammelled  freedom.  The  actors  in 
the  drama  Parkman  had  to  unfold  called  for 
the  resources  of  both  the  bold  and  the  subtle 
portrait-painter,  and  the  historian  answered 


184      GREAT  AMERICAN  WRITERS 

the  demand,  falling  perhaps  not  a  whit  below 
Motley  in  this  important  point.  Scene  after 
scene  of  thrilling  interest  had  to  be  painted 
vividly,  yet  with  minute  fidelity,  and  here 
again  Parkman  met  all  the  requirements  of 
his  theme.  It  is  no  wonder  that  with  his 
faithfulness,  his  thoroughness,  his  brilliant 
artistic  powers,  he  should  have  made,  as  we 
have  said,  a  deeper  appeal  to  modern  read 
ers  than  any  other  American  historian.  He 
seems  to  have  no  discomfiture  to  fear  at  the 
hands  of  archaeologists;  he  has  no  disastrous 
comparisons  to  fear,  since  he  rules  alone  in  a 
spacious  and  unique  realm  of  his  own.  One 
thinks  of  Parkman  when  one  thinks  of  Mont- 
calm  and  Wolfe,  of  Jesuit  missionaries  and 
coureurs  de  bois  threading  the  wilds,  of  forest 
fighting,  of  voyages  of  discovery  on  mighty 
streams — and  one's  critical  faculties  are,  at 
least  for  the  time  being,  held  in  abeyance. 

Parkman's  historical  series  began  in  1851 
with  the  two  volumes,  The  Conspiracy  of 
Pontiac,  which  treated  the  Indian  uprising  of 
1763.  Then  followed,  after  a  long  interval, 
Pioneers  of  France  in  the  New  World,  which 
appeared  in  1865.  The  Jesuits  in  North 
America  and  La  Salle  and  the  Discovery  of  the 
Great  West  came  next  at  intervals  of  two 
years.  Five  years  later,  1874,  appeared  The 
Old  Regime  in  Canada,  and  three  years  after- 


THE  HISTORIANS  185 

wards  Count  Frontenac  and  New  France  under 
Louis  XIV.  A  Half  Century  of  Conflict  was 
the  last  volume  to  be  published  in  point  of 
time,  its  date  being  1892,  the  year  before  its 
author's  death;  but  the  true  conclusion  of  the 
series  is  to  be  found  in  the  two  volumes  of 
1884  entitled  Montcalm  and  Wolfe,  in  which, 
according  to  some,  Parkman's  genius  as  a 
historian  appears  in  its  fullest  splendor.  The 
Old  Regime  in  Canada  may  appeal  more  to 
certain  readers;  but,  after  all,  it  is  idle  to 
make  such  comparisons,  except  for  the  pur 
pose  of  bringing  out  the  growth  of  Parkman's 
powers.  These  are  visible,  indeed,  in  The 
Conspiracy  of  Pontiac,  the  first  instalment  of 
the  series,  but  they  increased  greatly  with 
years  and  experience,  whether  we  consider  the 
flexible  style,  or  examine  the  skill  with  which 
character  is  analyzed  or  complex  materials 
ordered.  The  entire  group  of  volumes  con 
stitutes  a  life  work  of  which  any  historian 
since  Gibbon  might  be  proud;  when  Park 
man's  physical  disabilities  are  duly  weighed, 
one  is  at  a  loss  to  name  a  more  creditable  or 
more  truly  wonderful  achievement  in  the 
annals  of  literature,  the  supremely  creative 
masters  excepted.  Some  reservations  some 
readers  will  doubtless  make.  The  scale  may 
seem  too  large  for  what  is  after  all  an  episode, 
and  when  read  in  succession  the  instalments 


186      GREAT  AMERICAN  WRITERS 

of  the  story  may  seem  monotonous.  But, 
when  all  deductions  have  been  made,  Park- 
man  and  his  books  will  remain  objects  of 
scarcely  alloyed  admiration. 

Like  Motley,  Froude,  and  other  historians, 
Parkman  tried  his  hand  at  fiction.  His  single 
novel,  V assail  Morton  (1856)  was  an  impossible 
medley,  and  one  prefers  to  consider  that 
Parkman  showed  his  versatility  as  a  professor 
of  horticulture  at  Harvard  and  a  writer  on 
roses  than  as  a  novelist  or  romancer.  Per 
haps  if  he  had  been  instead  a  professor  of 
history,  he  would  still  have  made  his  histories 
fascinating;  yet  one  is  not  sure,  since  Ger 
manized  professors  seem  to  pay  slight  atten 
tion  to  style,  and  one  is  glad  to  have  him  just 
as  he  was,  a  somewhat  solitary  and  secluded 
figure  concentrated  upon  a  great  task. 

We  must  not  be  unjust,  however,  to  pro 
fessors,  especially  to  the  distinguished  occu 
pants  of  one  great  chair  at  Harvard.  The 
predecessor  of  Longfellow  and  Lowell,  the 
scholarly  George  Ticknor  (1791-1871),  may 
well  be  grouped  with  the  historians,  both  be 
cause  he  was  Prescott's  biographer  and  be 
cause  his  History  of  Spanish  Literature  was  an 
exhaustive  treatise  on  the  literature  of  the 
country  which  had  so  fascinated  Irving  and 
Prescott.  Ticknor,  too,  with  Edward  Ever 
ett,  set  an  example  to  Bancroft  and  Motley 


WEBSTER  AND  LINCOLN          187 

by  going  to  Germany  to  study,  and  in  his 
exact  scholarship  he  was  a  model  and  an  in 
spiration  to  most  of  the  men  we  have  treated 
in  this  chapter.  He  is  more  interesting  to  the 
general  reader  through  his  valuable  and  en 
tertaining  Life,  Letters,  and  Journals  of  1876 
than  he  is  through  his  still  authoritative 
treatise  on  Spanish  literature;  but  perhaps 
his  greatest  service  was  rendered  as  a  pioneer 
of  modern  scholarship  in  the  new  world. 


CHAPTER  IX 

WEBSTER   AND   LINCOLN 

IT  is  said,  perhaps  not  with  entire  justice, 
that  the  art  of  oratory  is  dying  in  America. 
It  is  certainly  nearer  the  truth  to  say  that 
many  good  orators  have  died  in  America 
within  the  past  century  and  a  half,  and  that 
most  of  their  works  have  died  with  them. 
It  is  the  good  fortune  of  Patrick  Henry  that 
his  fame  is  maintained  almost  entirely  by 
tradition.  Other  early  orators,  including 
preachers,  are  remembered  by  name,  but 
their  names  mean  little  save  to  the  special 
student.  Even  the  once  famous  Edward 
Everett  of  Massachusetts,  scholar,  Gover 
nor,  minister  to  England,  president  of  Har 
vard,  United  States  senator,  Secretary  of 


188     GREAT  AMERICAN  WRITERS 

State,  and  orator  and  lecturer  upon  innumer 
able  subjects  on  innumerable  occasions  is 
now  unread,  although  accessible  in  massive 
volumes  and  a  model  of  latter-day  classic 
eloquence  if  ever  there  was  one.  The  less 
academic  but  perhaps  even  more  "  golden 
tongued"  orator-statesman  of  Kentucky, 
Henry  Clay,  probably  the  most  intensely 
idolized  of  American  political  leaders,  is 
almost  unreadable,  while  his  fervent  admirer, 
Abraham  Lincoln,  who  did  not  anticipate 
literary  renown,  .is  more  read  than  many 
distinguished  professional  writers  of  a  gener 
ation  ago  and  holds  a  good  place  among 
American  authors.  Clay's  great  contem 
porary,  John  C.  Calhoun  of  South  Caro 
lina,  is  still  read  by  students,  not  so  much 
for  his  literary  merits,  as  because  he  is  the 
most  eminent  expositor  of  the  doctrine  of 
states-rights  and  the  most  acute  analyst  and 
defender  of  the  constitutional  rights  of 
minorities.  Robert  Y.  Hayne  of  South 
Carolina  is  still  read  and  remembered  as 
Webster's  far  from  feeble  opponent  in  the 
greatest  forensic  contest  in  our  history;  but 
most  of  the  other  orators  contemporary  with 
him  have  become  mere  names  save  to  the 
student  of  politics.  Even  the  greatest  of 
anti-slavery  orators,  the  passionate  advo 
cate  of  freedom,  Wendell  Phillips,  is  probably 


WEBSTER  AND  LINCOLN          189 

read  less  and  less  as  the  years  go  by,  although 
his  genius  as  a  speaker  is  indisputable  and 
his  moral  courage  worthy  of  the  highest 
praise.  It  is  true  that  Phillips  was  a  fanatic, 
but  his  comparative  eclipse,  from  the  point 
of  view  of  literary  fame,  is  not  due  to  that 
fact.  His  fate  is  but  another  illustration  of 
the  truth  that  the  spoken  word  when  set 
down  in  writing  becomes  literature  only  in 
very  rare  cases. 

Have  the  works  of  the  greatest  of 
American  orators,  Daniel  Webster,  become 
literature?  Editors  of  his  works  and  of 
selections  of  them  for  use  in  schools,  biog 
raphers,  historians,  critics  have  vied  with 
one  another  in  assuring  us  that  his  position 
as  a  man  of  letters  is  secure.  He  has  been 
ranked — by  Americans — with  Demosthenes 
and  Cicero,  and  some  perfervid  patriots 
seem  to  prefer  him  to  both  of  these  great 
orators.  They  appear  to  regard  the  Reply 
to  Hayne  as  the  greatest  speech  ever  de 
livered,  and  they  might  at  least  be  fairly 
satisfied  with  the  admission  that  no  mortal 
man  can  prove  beyond  a  doubt  that  it  is 
not  entitled  to  this  superlative  praise. 
WTiether  they  will  ever  be  able  to  get  all 
Americans  and  an  appreciable  number  of 
foreigners  to  share  their  exalted  opinion  of 
Webster  as  a  speaker,  writer,  and  statesman 


190      GREAT  AMERICAN  WRITERS 

may  well  be  doubted,  but  their  confidence  is 
somewhat  contagious,  and  few  of  their 
countrymen — for  a  very  good  reason — will 
ever  venture  to  wonder  whether  after  all 
Webster  means  as  much  in  the  history  of 
culture  as  Bossuet  and  Burke.  The  im 
portant  point,  however,  is  the  question  how 
many  reading  Americans  really  read  Webster 
save  in  a  few  orations;  that  is,  read  him  to 
such  an  extent  as  cultivated  men  and  women 
may  be  presumed  to  read  a  non-creative 
prose  writer  of  classic  excellence.  No  authori 
tative  answer  to  this  question  is  obtainable, 
but  the  facts  of  Webster's  bibliography,  if 
we  omit  editions  of  one  or  two  orations 
recommended  for  use  in  schools,  scarcely 
indicate  as  much  currency  for  his  writings 
as  warrants  one  in  accepting  without  reserve 
the  praise  given  by  his  admirers  to  his  achieve 
ments  as  a  writer.  That  he  is  the  greatest 
of  American  orators,  that  his  rank  as  a 
statesman  is  very  high,  that  his  services  as 
a  patriot  to  the  cause  of  union  can  scarcely 
be  overestimated,  that  his  speeches  as 
literature  deserve  grateful  and  admiring 
perusal — these  are  claims  in  his  behalf  that 
should  win  cordial  assent.  But  that  Webster 
was  the  superior  of  Cicero  or  Burke  as  a 
writer  is  a  statement  that  can  be  made  with 
impunity  only  in  the  bosom  of  one's  parish. 


WEBSTER  AND  LINCOLN          191 

It  must  be  added  in  justice  that  America  is 
a  very  large  parish,  and  that  we  ought  to 
proceed  to  give  a  short  sketch  of  Webster's 
eminent  career. 

He  was  born  in  New  Hampshire  in  1782 
and  early  astonished  his  rural  neighbors  by 
his  oratorical  gifts.  He  soon  became  the 
best  lawyer  in  his  state,  and  in  his  thirty- 
first  year  he  entered  Congress,  where  he 
distinguished  himself.  In  1816  he  removed 
to  Boston,  his  later  fame  being  thus  asso 
ciated  with  Massachusetts,  although  as  a 
matter  of  fact  he  was  the  chief  political  and 
legal  glory  of  New  England  at  large,  and  for 
many  years  the  idol  of  the  Whig  party 
throughout  the  union.  In  1817  he  resigned 
from  Congress  and  devoted  himself  for  some 
time  to  his  great  practice,  winning  in  this  year 
one  of  his  most  famous  victories  in  behalf 
of  his  alma  mater,  Dartmouth  College.  He 
was  now  the  foremost  advocate  in  the  country 
and  one  of  the  greatest  interpreters  of  the 
constitution.  As  a  commemorative  orator 
he  was  also  without  a  rival  from  1820,  when 
he  delivered  his  oration  on  the  two  hun^ 
dredth  anniversary  of  the  landing  of  the  Puri 
tans,  which  was  followed  in  a  few  years  by 
orations  on  the  laying  of  the  cornerstone  of  the 
Bunker  Hill  Monument  and  on  the  almost 
simultaneous  deaths  of  John  Adams  and 


192      GREAT  AMERICAN  WRITERS 

Thomas  Jefferson.  These  utterances  were 
not  only  inspiring  to  American  patriots,  but 
full  of  educational  value  to  the  not  very 
sophisticated  generation  that  heard  them. 
They  have  not  lost  this  value,  although  one 
may  doubt  their  importance  in  the  literature 
of  the  world. 

In  1822,  before  the  two  orations  mentioned 
last  were  delivered,  Webster  returned  to 
Congress,  and  five  years  later  he  was  sent 
to  represent  Massachusetts  in  the  Senate, 
where  he  advocated  protection  and  defended 
the  theory  of  an  indissoluble  Union.  Here 
in  1830  he  delivered  that  Reply  to  Hayne  in 
which  he  is  seen  at  his  highest  as  orator, 
patriot,  and  statesman.  He  is  too  large  to 
be  described  in  any  one  phrase,  but  we  do 
him  no  great  injustice  when  we  say  that  his 
highest  claim  to  remembrance  lies  in  the 
fact  that  during  a  most  critical  period  of 
our  history  he  was  beyond  all  other  men  the 
spokesman  of  the  Union.  The  country 
Washington  had  founded  and  Jefferson  had 
expanded  was  stirred  by  the  voice  of  Webster 
to  a  consciousness  of  its  life  and  aims  that 
enabled  Lincoln  and  Grant  to  save  it  from 
dismemberment.  The  Reply  to  Hayne  is  less 
important  as  a  contribution  to  constitu 
tional  history  than  some  of  its  admirers 
have  deemed,  but  it  and  others  of  Webster's 


WEBSTER  AND  LINCOLN          193 

deliverances  in  the  Senate,  where  with  Cal- 
houn  and  Clay  he  made  up  a  great  trium 
virate,  deserve  the  amplest  praise  as  expres 
sions  of  national  ideals. 

The  remainder  of  his  career,  which  was 
closed  in  1852,  requires  but  few  words. 
He  retained  his  fame  as  a  great  advocate, 
he  was  constantly  lured  on  by  the  hope  that 
he  might  reach  the  presidency,  he  rendered 
excellent  services  as  Secretary  of  State,  then 
alas!  he  disappointed  the  hopes  of  the  anti- 
slavery  men  by  his  support  of  Clay's  Com 
promise  of  1850.  Whittier's  terrible  denun 
ciation  in  Ichabod  did  him  injustice,  for 
Webster  was  too  completely  a  child  of  the 
age  of  compromises  to  be  able  to  see  as 
Lincoln  did  that  the  cause  of  the  Union  and 
the  cause  of  human  freedom  were  one  and 
inseparable.  His  famous  Seventh  of  March 
Speech,  which  alienated  so  many  admirers, 
was  a  more  mistaken  but  no  less  sincere 
effort  to  preserve  the  Union  than  the  Reply 
to  Hayne.  It  prevents  one,  however,  from 
claiming  for  Webster  the  highest  tribute 
that  can  be  given  to  a  public  man,  the  trib 
ute  that  is  due  to  clearsighted  and  bold 
defense,  against  all  odds,  of  the  cause  of 
truth  and  freedom.  Unfortunately  also 
Webster  must  be  denied  high  encomiums 
upon  his  private  life.  The  temptations  to 


194      GREAT  AMERICAN  WRITERS 

which  he  succumbed  were  great,  especially 
during  his  generation,  and  he  was  encouraged 
to  yield  to  them  by  the  foolish  shortsighted 
ness  of  his  admirers,  who  perhaps  deserve 
more  blame  than  he  does.  But,  when  all 
deductions  are  made,  he  remains  a  notable 
and  a  noble  figure,  almost  gigantic  in  his 
powers,  yet  certainly  not  in  literature 
the  demi-god  he  once  seemed  to  be. 

It  has  become  the  fashion  of  late  to  treat 
Abraham  Lincoln  as  more  than  a  demi-god, 
and  yet,  singularly  enough,  a  growing  reali 
zation  of  the  breadth  and  depth  of  his  humane 
qualities  is  responsible  in  large  measure  for 
the  apotheosizing  process  that  has  been  going 
on  ever  since,  at  the  zenith  of  his  noble 
career,  he  fell  a  victim  to  the  folly  and  fury 
of  a  fanatic  assassin.  To  describe  his  life 
here  would  be  as  superfluous  as  a  similar 
attempt  would  have  been  in  the  case  of  the 
American  with  whom  one  naturally  asso 
ciates  him,  Benjamin  Franklin.  Both  were 
self-educated;  both  rose  to  fame  and  emi 
nence  rather  through  the  possession  of  what 
we  call  character  than  through  the  exhibi 
tion  of  those  saliently  brilliant  and  rare 
features  of  mind  and  spirit  which  are  usually 
associated  with  genius;  both  used  literature 
as  a  means  to  an  end,  not  as  an  art  worthy  of 
their  entire  devotion;  both  owe  it  in  consider- 


WEBSTER  AND  LINCOLN         195 

able  measure  to  their  writings  that  they  live 
to-day  in  the  hearts  of  their  countrymen  in 
a  more  vital  fashion  than  if  they  depended 
for  fame  solely  upon  what  biographers  and 
historians  have  written  about  them.  Frank 
lin  through  his  versatility  displayed  as  man 
of  business,  citizen,  diplomatist,  statesman, 
scientist,  philanthropist,  humorist,  and  gen 
eral  man  of  letters  and  affairs,  seems  to  be  the 
more  wonderful  personality;  Lincoln  through 
the  tremendous  importance  of  the  services 
he  rendered  America  and  mankind  and 
through  the  simple  loftiness  of  his  character 
impresses  one  as  the  greater  man,  the  nobler 
soul.  Both  derive  much  from  contact  with 
the  soil,  from  racy,  homely  qualities;  neither 
belongs  with  men  like  Milton  and  Washington 
and  Robert  E.  Lee,  whose  genius  is  essentially 
aristocratic.  Both  make  a  naturally  strong 
appeal  to  a  democracy,  which,  through  a 
quite  justifiable  pride  in  such  of  its  great  men 
as  do  not  stand  aloof,  is  just  as  naturally 
inclined  slightly  to  exaggerate  their  merits 
and  to  overlook  their  defects. 

Lincoln's  superiority  over  Franklin  as  a 
man  accounts  for  such  superiority  over  his 
great  predecessor  as  he  shows  as  a  writer. 
The  severely  simple  eloquence  of  the  Gettys 
burg  Address  would  probably  not  have  been 
possible  to  Franklin,  despite  the  fact  that  he 


196      GREAT  AMERICAN  WRITERS 

too  had  access  to  the  Bible  and  Shakespeare 
for  inspiration.  The  tastes  of  his  time 
would  have  been  against  him,  as  well  as  his 
own  comparative  lack  of  the  spiritual  and  the 
poetic.  Lincoln  thought  just  as  much  of  the 
people  as  Franklin,  nevertheless  at  times  he 
drew  apart  from  them  and  dwelt  in  spiritual 
solitude,  thus  partaking  in  a  measure  with 
the  great  lonely  geniuses  of  the  race.  Hence 
comes  the  high  seriousness  of  his  writings 
when  he  is  at  his  best,  in  the  two  inaugurals, 
in  the  speech  at  Cooper  Union  in  1860,  in 
some  of  his  letters.  In  variety  of  semi- 
creative  power,  as  essayist,  humorist,  and 
narrator  Franklin  displays  a  wider  range  of 
genius,  and  in  some  respects  is  nearer  to  an 
accomplished,  though  not  deliberate,  man  of 
letters  than  is  Lincoln.  But  in  quality  of 
inspiration  he  seems  to  be  greatly  Lincoln's 
inferior.  One  prefers  to  associate  the  great 
President  rather  with  that  noble  ethical 
stimulator  Emerson.  Perhaps  more  than 
any  other  Americans  since  Washington  these 
two  have  made  noble  ideals  of  life  public  and 
private  seem  realizable  to  their  countrymen. 
In  their  writings  sounds  more  clearly  than 
anywhere  else  perhaps  that  "citizen  note" 
which  seems,  as  we  have  said,  to  be  the  most 
distinctive  quality  of  American  literature. 
Lincoln  shares  also  with  Longfellow  the 


HARRIET  BEECHER  STOWE        197 

power  of  simple  straightforward  appeal  to 
the  unsophisticated  heart.  Hence,  given  his 
great  place  in  history,  it  is  no  wonder  that 
his  place  in  American  literature  should  be 
with  the  greatest  and  the  most  truly  national 
of  all  our  writers,  that  his  speeches  should 
be  read  while  those  of  Everett  and  Clay  are 
forgotten,  that  he  should  long  since  have 
surpassed  even  the  mighty  Webster  in  at 
tracting  to  himself  the  admiration  and 
appreciation  of  the  entire  American  people. 
His  successor  is  not  in  sight,  not  only  because 
no  crisis  has  arisen  in  which  it  has  been  possi 
ble  for  any  man  to  render  public  services 
commensurate  with  his,  but  because  no 
American  has  since  been  able  to  use  the 
vernacular  at  once  so  simply  and  so  nobly. 

CHAPTER  X 

HARRIET   BEECHER   STOWE 

MRS.  STOWE  illustrates  conspicuously  those 
traits  of  the  Puritan  temper  which  in  Haw 
thorne  were  obscure.  Like  others  of  the 
Beecher  family,  she  had  the  gift  of  making 
her  dreams  tell  in  real  life.  If  we  are  to  judge 
by  the  rjajsjojijL-siirr^d  and  the  reform  it 
heralded,  she  ^rote_  the  most  effective  novel^ 
in  ourjiterature;  but  apart  from  her  imag- 


198      GREAT  AMERICAN  WRITERS 

inaiiyejvriting  she  exerted  powerfully  all  the 
influences  oT~a  good  citizen^  Her  scorn  of 
evil  was  as  practical  as  her  praise  of  righteous 
ness.  All  her  service  was  touched  with  chiv 
alrous  errantry. 

The  very  effectiveness  of  her  genius  has 
placed  her  literary  fame  in  some  jeopardy. 
Her  great  book  was  so  closely  implicated 
with  the  cause  it  served  that  the  world  lets  it 
recede  into  an  historic  past  with  the  other 
documents  of  the  great  war;  and  measured 
by  this  almost  military  efficiency  her  other 
books  seem,  even  as  historical  documents, 
comparatively  negligible;  so  that  all  her 
writing,  in  one  way  or  the  other,  seems  likely 
to  be  underestimated.  But  no  one  would 
have  cared  less  than  herself,  since  her  work 
was  accomplished  and  her  spirit  remains. 

Harriet  Elizabeth  Beecher  was  born  June 
14, 1811,  at  Litchfield,  Connecticut,  where  her 
father,  the  Rev.  Dr.  Lyman  Beecher,  was 
pastor.  From  her  mother,  Roxana  Foote,  as 
well  as  from  her  father,  Harriet  inherited 
great  energy  and  religious  fervor.  After  her 
mother's  death,  in  1815,  she  was  for  a  time 
with  her  grandmother,  at  Guilford,  Connecti 
cut;  in  1817  her  father  married  Miss  Harriet 
Porter,  who  proved  an  excellent  stepmother. 
But  the  chief  influence  of  Harriet's  youth  was 
her  elder  sister,  Catherine,  who  had  started  a 


HARRIET  BEECHER    STOWE        199 

school  in  Hartford.  When  Dr.  Beecher  in 
1826  became  pastor  of  the  Hanover  Street 
Church  in  Boston,  Harriet  stayed  with  her 
sister. 

In  1832,  however,  the  entire  family  re 
moved  to  Walnut  Hills,  near  Cincinnati, 
where  Dr.  Beecher  had  accepted  the  Presi 
dency  of  the  Lane  Theological  Seminary. 
It  was  at  Walnut  Hills  that  Harriet  discovered 
her  gift,  with  a  prize  short  story  in  a  local 
magazine.  It  was  there  that  she  met  and 
married,  January  6, 183G,  Professor  Calvin  E. 
Stowe,  who  taught  in  the  seminary.  From 
Walnut  Hills  three  years  earlier  she  had 
made  a  visit  to  Kentucky,  where  she  had 
seen  the  institution  of  slavery  in  its  happier 
aspects.  It  was  from  her  home,  in  1839,  that 
Professor  Stowe  and  Henry  Ward  Beecher 
saved  a  free  colored  girl  who  was  being  pur 
sued  by  her  former  master.  In  Cincinnati 
nearby  the  pro-slavery  mobs  burned  the 
printing  shops  where  emancipation  had  been 
advocated,  and  one  editor,  J.  P.  Lovejoy,  was 
murdered.  Lovejoy  was  a  friend  of  the 
Beechers.  It  was  at  Walnut  Hills,  then,  that 
Mrs.  Stowe  lived  the  experiences  which  she 
converted  into  her  book. 

Her  early  sketches  were  published  in  1843, 
under  the  title  of  The  Mayflower.  In  1849 
Dr.  Stowe  became  a  professor  in  Bowdoin 


200      GREAT  AMERICAN  WRITERS 

College,  and  his  family  removed  to  Bruns 
wick,  Maine,  in  April,  1850.  A  month  be 
fore,  New  England's  indignation  had  been 
roused  by  Webster's  defense  of  Henry  Clay's 
compromise,  and  the  passage  of  the  Fugitive 
Slave  Act,  by  which  citizens  in  free  states 
were  required  to  assist  in  the  recovery  of 
slave  "property,"  convinced  Mrs.  Stowe,  as 
well  as  many  other  Northerners,  that  the 
time  for  action  was  at  hand.  In  February, 
1851,  she  began  writing  Uncle  Tom's  Cabin, 
the  first  instalment  of  which  appeared  in  the 
National  Era,  June  5.  In  book  form  it  was 
published  in  Boston,  March  20,  1852,  and  its 
enormous  and  continuous  sale  began  at  once. 
f  Mrs.  Stowe's  life  from  that  time  was  event 
ful  and  full  of  accomplishment,  but  the 
significance  of  it  had  been  conditioned  by  her 
previous  experiences.  She  had  inherited 
missionary  fervor,  and  had  seen  what  it  is  to 
be  oppressed,  and  she  devoted  herself  natu 
rally  to  any  cause  of  enfranchisement  that 
presented  itself.  Of  the  outward  details  of 
her  career  it  need  only  be  recorded  that  she 
was  twice  abroad;  and  on  her  first  trip  just 
after  the  publication  of  Uncle  Tom's  Cabin, 
she  was  welcomed  with  remarkable  honor  in 
England  and  Scotland.  In  1852  her  husband 
became  professor  in  the  Andover  Theological 
Seminary,  and  in  1863  the  family  removed 


HARRIET  BEECHER  STOWE        201 

from  Andover  to  Hartford,  which  was  their 
final  home.  After  the  war  Mrs.  Stowe  bought 
a  place  at  Mandarin,  Florida,  and  interested 
herself  practically  in  the  South.  Her  chief 
publications,  after  Uncle  Tom's  Cabin,  were 
Dred,  1856,  The  Minister's  Wooing,  1858, 
The  Pearl  of  Orr's  Island,  1862,  Agnes  of  Sor 
rento,  1863,  Old  Town  Folks,  1869,  Old  Town 
Fireside  Stories,  1871,  My  Wife  and  I,  1872, 
We  and  Our  Neighbors,  1875,  Poganuc  People, 
1878.  Mrs.  Stowe  died  at  Hartford,  July  1, 
1896,  and  was  buried  at  Andover  beside  her 
husband,  who  had  died  ten  years  before. 

Her  jaovels  are  of  two  quite  different  kinds. 
Her  reputation  was  made  by  a  novel  with  jt 
purpose,  ancT~slie~tQtJowe6!  her  theme  in  a 
second  story ;  her  early  writing,  however,  and 
most  of  her  later  books  dealt  with  the  New 
England,  oflieJLjaiJIiQad.  If  this  second  kind 
ofstory  is  less  thought  of  now  when  her  name 
is  mentioned,  at  least  the  literary  historian 
knows  that  in  this  field  she  was  a  pioneer.  It 
is  her  pictuj^^^e^Englan^jrather  than 
Hawthorne's,  wiich  has  been  imitated;  it  is 
with  her  that  the  work  of  Miss  Sarah  Orne 
Jewett  or  Mrs.  Mary  Wilkins-Freeman  is 
associated.  She  therefore  has  a  double  place 
in  American  literature,  with  a  masterpiece  in^ 
one  field  and  pioneer  triumphs  in  another. 

In  a  certain  sense  Uncle  Tom's  Cabin  was 


202     GREAT  AMERICAN  WRITERS 

intended  as  gro]}aga^aj_  Mrs.  Stowe  be 
lieved  that  if  slavery  were  once  clearly  seen, 
it  would  be  abandoned.  She  therefore  wished 
to  represent.  tbe_mstitution  as  it  was.  Since 
it  was  a  national  institution,  the  guilt  of  it 
was  in  her  opinion  national.  She  had  no  in 
tention  of  seeming  to  pass  judgment  on  the 
South.  Indeed,  the  cruel  slave-dealers  and 
the  fiendish  plantation  owner  in  the  story  are 
Northerners,  and  Miss  Ophelia,  who  cannot 
understand  the  negroes  and  serves  them  only 
by  way  of  self-sacrifice,  is  a  New  Englander. 
St.  Clare,  Eva's  father,  the  attractive  char 
acter  of  the  book,  is  a  Southerner,  and  the 
pleasantest  home  described  is  that  of  the 
Shelbys,  in  Kentucky.  Mrs.  Stowe  had,  as 
she  thought,  taken  pains  jo_jhow  thatjslay- 
to  Northern  individuals 


^ 

as_  io  Southerru^and  she  was  surprised  when 
the  South  thought  her  portraiture  uncom 
plimentary. 

Of  literary  art  in  any  superficial  sense, 
Uncle  Tom's  Cabm  iiaajvery  little.  It  has 
the  extreme  simplicity  of  great  arj:,  however, 
and  it  imparts  that  confidence  that  the  reader 
is  seeing  the  truth,  which  only  a  great  book 
can  impart.  Carlyle  wrote  to  its  author  that 
he  knew  the  story  represented  the  facts 
truthfully,  although  he  had  never  seen  the 
life  it  recorded.  This  self-evident  veracity 


HARRIET  BEECHER  STOWE  203 
nnyg1_Tt.s_pnwf>r ;_  against  counter- 
charges  and  contradictions  innumerable,  its 
testimony  was  unshaken.  And  beyond  the 
immediate  cause  which  it  served,  it  has  be 
come  theone^  widely  known  record  of  the 
South  before  the  war,  as  Cooper's  novels, 
rightly  or  wrongly,  have  become  the  world 
record  of  the  American  Indian,  and  as  Bret 
Harte's  stories  have  become  the  world  mem 
ory  of  the  California  miners. 

In  her  Western  experiences  Mrs.  Stowe  had 
seen  some  of  slavery's  demoralizing  effects, 
upon  both  the  slave  and  the  owner.  In  this 
book,  however,  she  was  chiefly  concerned 
with  the_jlave.  _  She  struck  at  the  ca 
4£f£c-t-(9t-slaYery— the  fact  that  it  was  not,  as 
its  defenders  claimed,  a  patriarcjiaj_jnj3jitu- 
tion,  nqj^couJoL jtjbe^  so  long  as  slaves,  like 
other  property,  were  subject  to  sale.  The 
Southern  apologists  held  that  the  masters 
were  in  general  humane,  and  provided  for  the 
negro  better  than  he  could  provide  for  him 
self  ;  and  such  masters,  and  such  fortunate 
slaves,  Mrs.  Stowe  had  seen  on  her  Kentucky 
visit.  But  she  had  had  other  experience  of 
what  often  happened  when  the  kind  master 
died,  and  the  slaves  passed  to  less  kind,  even 
cruel,  hands,  and  the  members  of  one  family 
were  scattered,  perhaps  never  to  see  each  other 
again.  Worse  than  that,  even  during  the  life 


204      GREAT  AMERICAN  WRITERS 

of  a  kind  master,  a  valuable  slave  might  be 
seized  for  debt,  and  the  more  valuable  the 
slave,  the  more  surely  the  creditors  would 
seize  him. 

The  novel,  then,  is  a  study  oj_this  separa- 
Jtion  of  slaves  by  sa.l£.  Tnough  the  picture  of 
Southern  life  is  filled  in  with  details,  the  em 
phasis  is  upon  those  critical  moments  when 
the  "property"  is  dispersed.  Uncle  Tom, 
who  has  made  himself  valuable  by  efforts  to 
be  truly  religious  and  civilized,  jsjspld  for. his 
roaster's  debts^  Mr.  Shelby,  his  master,  parts 
with  him  reluctantly,  and  is  pleased  when  the 
slave-dealer  reports  that  Tom  is  sold  into  a 
good  family.  The  sale  proves,  therefore,  as 
slightly  tragic  as  possible;  nothing  worse  has 
happened  than  that  Tom  is  separated  from 
his  wife  and  children.  But  Tom's  second 
master^--St.  Clare^jdjes  unexpectedly,  and 
his  selfish  widow  sells  Tom,  since  he  is  one  of 
the  most  valuable  asseETbf  the  estate,  and 
he  falls  into  the  hands  of  a  monster.  Whether 
or  not  the  picture  of  Legree^  isjjverdrawn— 
and  Mrs.  Stowe  was  convinced  that  he  was  not 
so  exceptional  as  her  Southern  critics  claimed 
— at  least  she  had  proved  her  indictment 
against  slavery;  no  system  was  patriarchal 
in  which  the  slave  was  transferred  unex 
pectedly  from  master  to  master,  although  his 
kinder  masters  had  intended  to  set  him  free. 


HARRIET  BEECHER  STOWE        205 

That  Tom  had  served  Mr.  Shelby  faithfully 
was  no  protection  when  the  mortgage-holding 
slave-dealer  set  eyes  upon  him.  Though  he 
saved  Eva's  life  and  became  her  beloved 
comrade,  and  thereby  earned  the  gratitude 
of  her  father,  it  availed  him  nothing  when 
that  father  died.  The  episode  of  little  Eva's 
death,  which  appealed  to  the  same  phase  of 
mawkish  sentiment  that  delighted  in  the  end 
of  little  Nell,  has  its  real  effect  even  now, 
when  it  no  longer  produces  tears;  it  shows 
how  near  a  slave  like  Tom  could  come  to 
human  fellowship  with  the  master,  and  yet 
be  sold.  When  St.  Clare  dies,  the  only 
difference  between  Tom  and  the  good-for- 
nothing  valet  is  that  Tom's  virtues  give  him 
a  higher  market  value.  There  could  be 
nothing  patriarchal  in  a  system  which  pro 
duced  such  a  situation. 

Yet  it  must  be  remembered  that  Mrs. 
Stowe  was  not_blind_to^thepeculiarities  of  the 
negro  temperament.  JJJFe  haJ~no  quarrel 
with  ^those~whb  said  that  the  negro  lent  him 
self  naturally  to  the  institution  of  slavery. 
That  such  a  nature  as  Tom's  needed  pro 
tection,  she  never  denied;  but  slavery,  as  it 
operated  upon  Uncle  Tom,  was  the  very  re 
verse  of  protection.  She  ascribes  to  £om!s- 
honesty  the  fact  that  he  never  ran  away,  and 
sKe~would  not  discredit  her  own  testimony; 


206      GREAT  AMERICAN  WRITERS 

yet  she  is  not  unwilling  that  we  should  ob 
serve  it  is  the  full-blooded  negro  who  makes 
no  effort  for  his  freedom.  George  Harris  and 
Eliza,  whose  lives  are  to  be  ruined  by  Mr. 
Shelby's  sale  of  their  child,  make  a  desperate 
and  successful  attempt  to  be  free.  They, 
however,  are  mulattoes.  Their  story  is  sec- 
ondary  in  the  novel  to  the  fateTof  UncIe^Tbm, 
but  secondary  only  because  they  "have  the 
enterprise  of  their  white  ancestors,  and  are 
therefore  not  typical  slaves. 

In  her  next  novel,  Dred,  Mrs.  Stowe  con 
tinued  her  pictures  of  the  bad  effects,  of  slav 
ery^  but  she  now  showed  the  influence  of  the 
institution  upon  the  white  people  rather  than 
upon  their  servants.  By  that  very  change  of 
purpose  she  gained  in  subtlety;  to  exhibit 
the  physical  sufferings  of  Uncle  Tom,  or  the 
desperate  peril  of  Eliza  and  George  Harris, 
required  less  fineness  of  imagination  and  led 
to  a  less  discriminating  result,  than  to  demon 
strate  the  reaction  of  evil  power  upon  him 
who  uses  it.  The  novel  was  therefore  consid 
ered  by  many  competent  readers  an  ad 
vance  upon  Uncle  Tom's  Ccib'in.  If  in  the  end 
it  attained  no  such  fame,  the  explanation  is 
easily  provided  in  that  very  subtlety  of  pur^ 
jx>5e  andjeffect*_  It  is  less_simple,  less  passion 
ate,  less  coherent  than  the  earlier  book,  Tnit 
in  many  respects  it  is_the_richeat_oj ...Mrs.. 


HARRIET  BEECHER  STOWE        207 

Stowe's  writings;  it  contains  most  of  that 
interpretation  of  life  which  we  expect  of  a 
book  whose  intention  is  ethical. 

Nina  Gordon,  the  heroine,  is  mistress  of  a 
large  plantation.  She  has  one  near  relative, 
her  brother  Tom.  She  depends  for  advice  in 
most  matters,  however,  upon  Harry,  her  slave 
overseer.  Harry  is  her  own  half-brother,  and 
knows  that  he  is,  but  she  is  completely  igno 
rant  of  her  father's  sin.  Mrs.  Stowe  takes 
great  pains  to  trace  the  steps  by  which  the 
elder  Gordon  had  convinced  himself  that  his 
illegitimate  son  should  not  be  acknowledged, 
nor  set  free,  but  should  remain  in  the  family 
to  look  after  his  white  sister  and  brother.  Un 
pleasant  to  Harry  as  the  relation  is,  he  finds 
it  bearable  until  Tom  returns, — the  incarna 
tion  of  all  the  moral  danger  of  slave-holding. 
Tom  has  become  insolent  and  vicious,  and 
instinctively  feels  something  to  resent  in 
Harry's  character.  He  falls  in  love  with 
Harry's  wife,  and  announces  his  purpose  to 
buy  her.  That  such  a  situation  was  possible, 
even  frequent,  in  a  slave-holding  society  Mrs. 
Stowe  thought  she  had  good  proof.  But  even 
without  proof,  nothing  in  Uncle  Tom's  Cabin 
was  so  appalling  an  indictment  of  slavery  as 
this  possibility. 

It  is  the  fault  of  the  book,  however,  that 
Mrs.  Stowe  is  embarrassed  by  the  wealth  of 


208      GREAT  AMERICAN  WRITERS 

her  material.  She  proposes  to  herself  sp^many 
problems  that  she  has  nojbjjme  to  snlvp  thorn 
all  reasonably.  It  seems  unreasonable  that 
±Iarry~sh"ould  save  his  wife  so  easily,  if  the 
peril  was  indeed  so  grave.  And  with  the 
solution,  or  discarding,  j)j^this  proble^i^_Mrs. 
Stpwe  begins  what  is  practically  a  new  story, 
in  the  account  of  Clay tonraTnlglfmSHeSrre- 
former,  to  whom  Nina  is  engaged.  Clayton 
illustrates  the  occasional  effect  of  slavery 
upon  the  far-sighted  white  man,  upon  the 
individual  who  realized  that  only  an  improve 
ment  of  conditions  would  save  the  country 
from  terrible  catastrophe.  He  therefore  in 
stitutes  reforms  upon  his  plantation,  teach 
ing  his  negroes  to  read  and  write,  and  making 
himself  the  champion  of  the  slaves,  against 
the  wish  of  his  friends  and  relatives.  In  one 
of  the  best  situations  of  the  story  he  wins  an 
unpopular  case  in  court,  only  to  have  the  de 
cision  reversed,  on  appeal,  by  the  judge,  his 
own  father.  He  persuades  Nina  also  to  try 
the  experiment  of  education  on  her  own  ser 
vants.  But  his  happiness  ends  with  her 
sudden  and  unaccounted-for  death.  His  re 
forms  then  bring  him  into  such  disrepute 
that  he  is  forced  to  leave  the  state.  The 
problem  which  he  illustrates  is  therefore  in  a 
measure  unsolved ;  to  say  that  he  failed  is  not 
to  answer  the  question  as  to  the  value  of  the 


HARRIET  BEECHER  STOWE        209 

experiment,   had   he   been  allowed  to  com 
plete  it. 

There  remains  but  one  other  problem  in  the 
story  —  and  that  is  represented  in  the  negro 
who  gives  his  name  to  the  book.  QrejJ,  like 
Cassy  in  Uncle  Tom's  Cabin,  supplies  that 
illustration  of  the  love  oijnystery  and  super- 
naTuraKsn^  of  African 

character  would  be  complete.  From  our 
first  acquaintance  with  him,  when  from  the 
darkness  his  voice  sounds  its  prophecy  over 
the  camp-meeting,  we  expect  in  him  some 
unusual  revelation  of  power.  In  his  refuge 
in  the  swamp  he  appeals  equally  to  the  imag 
ination,  a  born  leader  and  inspired  savior  of 
his  race.  But  the  situation^  of  which  he  wasL 
the  centre  proved  as  impossible  of  solution 
as  the  other  two.  He  is  disposed  of  quite 
illogically~when  the  slave-hunter's  bullet 
kills  him. 

The  one  thoroughly  successful  theme  in  the 
story  is  STlbo^^^^3Blfc*»^WJ^S]!^Lita 
succesTTs  accidental.  The^old.Jiegro,  Tipp, 
wno  devoted  himself  to  bringing  up  in  a  man 
ner  befitting  their  birth  the  destitute  white 
children  of  the  house  he  served,  is  asjs 
feictoiy  a  record  of  slavery  as  its 


The  very  limita 
tions  of  Tipp's  character  —  the  fact  that  he  is 
less  heroic  and  less  serviceable  than  Uncle 


210      GREAT  AMERICAN  WRITERS 
Tom,    and    less    emotional    than    Gassy   or 
Dred,  justifies  him  the  more  as  a  faithful 
£prtraiL 

Aside  from  these  two  books,  the  bulk  of 
Mrs.  Stowe's  work  was  devoted  to  New  Eng 
land.  She  was  a_realist,  of  the  hestjdad,  who 
described  faithfully^  not  from  scientific  mo 
tives  of  accuracy,  but  from  affectionate 
memory.  Her  first  published  story,  Uncle 
Lot,  whieh  had  won  the  prize  in  the  Cincin 
nati  magazine,  was  of  this  kind,  a  study  of 
the  quiet,  idealistic ^J^ewJEngland  life;  and 
this  subject  she  returned  to  in  FKeTFearl  of 
Orr's  Island,  and  the  Old  Town  books,  and 
Poganuc  People,  which  was  in  a  sort  a  memo 
rial  of  her  own  girlhood.  The  chief  illustra 
tion  of  this  side  of  her  work,  however,  is  The 
Minister's  Wooing,  which  Lowell  thought  the 
best* of  her  stories. 

J*  Much  of  the  interest  of  this  novel,  to  Mrs. 
Stowe,  was  in  the  tjiemeof  the  supposed  ship 
wreck  of  an  unconverted  son.  She  had  just 
lost  her  son  Henry,  a  student  at  Dartmouth, 
who  was  drowned  while  bathing  in  the  Con 
necticut;  and  about  his  spiritual  state  she 
had  such  misgivings  as  only  her  old-fashioned 
theology  was  capable  of.  Her  sister  Cath 
erine  had  suffered  similar  mental  agony 
years  before,  over  the  death  of  her  betrothed, 
about  whose  salvation  the  orthodox  could  not 


HARRIET  BEECHER  STOWE 

be  sure.  Mrs.  Stowe  evidently  intended  her 
sincere  and  touching  statement  of  this  sorrow 
to  be  the  central  interest  of  the  book. 

But  the  modern  reader  turns  rather  to 
Dr.  Hopkins,  the  minister,  and  his  fine  sac 
rifice.  Perhaps  only  a  New  Englander  or  a 
Scotchman  could  understand  Mrs.  Scudder's 
extreme  ambition  to  marry  her  daughter 
Mary  to  the  rather  elderly  minister.  When 
Mary's  lover,  James  Marvyn,  is  supposed  to 
be  drowned,  Mary  has  no  defense  against 
her  mother's  hopes,  and  promises  herself  to 
Dr.  Hopkins, — and  then  her  lover  returns. 
For  once  Mrs.  Stowe  was  proof  against  the 
maudlin  sentiment  of  those  decades  and 
did  not  solve  the  problem  by  killing  the 
heroine.  Dr.  Hopkins  sees  the  situation  and 
releases  Mary  so  that  she  can  love  her  true 
mate.  And  the  minister's  sacrifice  is  told 
with  fine  humor,  with  no  exaggeration  of 
sentiment  to  impair  its  nobility. 

It  is  perhaps  useless  to  regret  that  it  is  only 
the  stories  dealing  with  slavery — or  we  may 
say,  Uncle  Tom's  Cabin — which  preserve  Mxs. 
Stow_e's  fame,  but  it  is  not  useless  to  repeat 
that  her  influence  is  felt  in  those  New  Eng 
land  stories  of  the  American  past,  which 
have  since  been  the  model  for  many  studies 
of  other  parts  of  her  own  country — perhaps 
even  of  countries  overseas. 


312     GREAT  AMERICAN  WRITERS 
CHAPTER  XI 

WALT   WHITMAN 

WALT  WHITMAN  has  been  one  of  the  most  de 
bated  of  American  poets.  He  has  been  chal 
lenged,  not,  like  Poe,  as  to  the  depth  or  im 
portance  of  his  poetic  quality,  but  as  to 
whether  he  has  any  poetic  quality  at  all. 
By  way  of  contrast,  he  has  been  praised  as 
the  greatest  of  American  poets.  At  present 
his  fame  is  on  the  increase,  and  although  many 
readers  still  prefer  the  older  verse  music  to 
his  rugged  chants,  and  persist  in  asking  for 
some  winnowing  of  taste  in  the  subjects  of 
poetry,  yet  few  now  deny  the  power  of  his 
imagination  and  the  truly  democratic  reach 
of  his  sympathies.  Doubtless  in  a  few  years 
a  majority  of  American  critics  will  be  glad  to 
allow  his  claim  as  the  representative  poet  of 
his  country. 

This  improvement  in  his  position  has  been 
aided  by  world-wide  changes  of  taste  in  other 
arts  than  poetry,  and  by  corresponding 
changes  in  esthetic  theory,  which  cannot  be 
gone  into  here.  But  perhaps  these  changes 
rest  on  the  larger  change  in  mankind's  vision 
of  society  which  has  gradually  been  brought 
about  by  the  theory  of  evolution.  Even  the 


WALT  WHITMAN  213 

untrained  man,  sharing  in  a  kind  of  diffused 
science,  now  thinks  of  all  life  as  having  in 
herent  importance  and  dignity.  In  this  atti 
tude  of  mind  lies  the  democratic  idea,  and 
also  the  very  essence  of  Whitman's  poetic 
theory  and  practice. 

He  was  born  at  West  Hills,  Long  Island, 
May  31,  1819.  His  father,  Walter  Whitman, 
whose  name  he  inherited  and  abbreviated, 
removed  to  Brooklyn  in  1824,  and  after  some 
attendance  at  the  public  schools,  Whitman 
got  a  place  in  a  lawyer's  office,  then  in  a 
doctor's,  and  finally  learned  the  printer's 
trade.  His  school  education  he  supplemented 
by  enthusiastic  reading  in  the  more  imagina 
tive  kinds  of  literature;  Scott  and  The  Arabian 
Nights  were  early  favorites,  and  later  the 
Bible,  Shakespeare,  Ossian,  the  best  translated 
versions  of  Homer,  ^Eschylus,  Sophocles,  the 
old  German  Nibelungen,  the  ancient  Hindoo 
poems,  and  one  or  two  other  masterpieces, 
Dante's  among  them.  In  1838  he  tried  school 
teaching  in  the  country,  but  returned  to  his 
printing  and  drifted  into  newspaper  work. 
From  1848-1849  he  edited  the  Brooklyn 
Daily  Eagle.  1849  saw  him  in  New  Orleans, 
on  the  staff  of  the  Daily  Crescent,  but  two 
years  later  he  was  again  in  Brooklyn. 

Leaves  of  Grass,  his  first  volume,  was  pub 
lished  in  1855.  Throughout  his  life  he  re- 


214     GREAT  AMERICAN  WRITERS 

issued  this  volume  with  alterations  and  ad 
ditions.  His  next  volume,  Drum  Taps,  1865, 
was  founded  on  his  actual  experiences  in  the 
war.  He  volunteered  as  an  army  nurse,  and 
served  faithfully  in  the  hospitals  and  camps. 
After  the  war  he  was  rewarded  with  govern 
ment  clerkships,  which  he  held  until  1874, 
when  he  suffered  a  stroke  of  paralysis.  The 
rest  of  his  life  was  spent  in  Camden,  New 
Jersey.  His  later  volumes  of  prose  and  verse 
were  Passage  to  India,  1870;  Democratic 
Vistas,  1870;  Memoranda  during  the  War, 
1875;  Specimen  Days  and  Collect,  1882;  No 
vember  Boughs,  1888;  and  Good-bye,  My 
Fancy,  1891.  He  died  at  Camden,  March 
26,  1892. 

The  poetry  of  Whitman  made  vigorous  at 
tacks  upon  tradition  in  both  its  matter  and 
its  manner.  The  twofold  peculiarity,  how 
ever,  is  from  a^single  cause.  Whitman  was 
the  conscientious  prophet  of  naturalness,  and 
his  hand  was  against  all  conventions.  To 
think  of  him  as  an  irresponsible  charlatan  is 
to  come  furthest  from  a  true  valuation,  for 
he  had  the  literary  background  as  much  as 
any  poet,  and  he  is  by  far  the  most  thoughtful 
of  American  poets.  That  he  violated  the  tra 
ditions  of  verse  rhythm,  and  that  he  intro 
duced  into  his  poems  subject  matter  usually 
considered  not  fit  for  conversation,  to  say 


WALT  WHITMAN  215 

nothing  of  poetry,  are  obvious  and  compara 
tively  unimportant  facts.  To  dwell  upon 
them  would  not  explain  his  great  power  over 
so  many  men. 

If  we  consider  his  philosophy  in  some  detail, 
these  aspects  of  his  poetic  work  will  explain 
themselves.  He  was  in  some  essential  ways 
a  disciple  of  Emerson.  That  is,  he  believed 
in  the  self-sufficiency  of  the  individual,  in 
the  divine  possibilities  of  every  man,  in  a 
common  human  nature  so  pervasive  that 
what  any  man  feels  or  thinks  or  knows  is  a 
matter  of  concern  to  all  other  men.  Like 
Emerson,  he  believed  that  in  himself  was  the 
solution  of  all  his  own  questions;  the  only 
difference  between  them  was  in  their  taste. 
Of  this  precious  seasoning  of  wisdom  Whit 
man  had  almost  none.  Where  Emerson 
looked  into  his  own  heart  and  tactfully  quoted 
himself  under  the  disguise  of  "the  poet 
Osman,"  Whitman  came  out  frankly  with 
the  personal  pronoun,  at  the  risk  of  seeming 
a  prodigious  egoist.  Philosophically,  how 
ever,  both  were  equally  modest,  and  it  is 
essentially  Emerson  we  are  listening  to  when 
Whitman  sings, 

"I  celebrate  myself; 
And  what  I  assume,  you  shall  assume; 
For  every  atom  belonging  to  me,  as  good  belongs 
to  you." 


216      GREAT  AMERICAN  WRITERS 

But  if  Whitman  shares  with  Emerson  the 
belief  in  the  self-sufficiency  of  the  individual 
soul,  he  does  not  at  all  share  Emerson's  adora 
tion  of  solitude.  On  the  contrary,  Whit 
man's  love  of  social  man  is  his  chief  passion. 
With  all  possible  emphasis  upon  the  dignity 
of  the  individual,  he  contemplates  the  ideal 
man  always  in  comradeship  with  his  fellows. 
This  point  of  view,  which  made  him  the 
true  spokesman  of  democracy,  and  helped 
him  to  foresee  the  essential  problems  of  his 
own  country,  was  due  chiefly  to  his  genuine 
love  of  mankind.  Whatever  reinforcement  of 
his  affections  he  got  from  political  or  scientific 
theory,  he  was  a  democrat  in  his  heart  before 
he  was  in  his  mind.  All  things  touched  by 
human  life  were  to  him  necessarily  touched 
with  emotion,  charged  with  overtones,  the 
truest  subject  of  poetry.  All  the  labors  and 
pastimes  of  men  were  to  him  suggestive  of 
poetic  feeling;  much  as  he  loved  nature,  he 
liked  best  scenes  of  traffic  in  cities,  crowded 
thoroughfares,  in  which  there  was  the  most 
varied  contact  with  energetic  human  nature. 
This  catholic  sympathy  for  man  in  a  state  of 
social  busy-ness,  is  the  key  to  those  least 
successful  poems  of  his,  in  which  he  made 
what  seems  a  catalogue  of  human  occupa 
tions,  merely  naming  the  stevedore  singing, 
the  riflemen  shooting,  the  raft-tenders  blow- 


WALT  WHITMAN  217 

ing  their  bugles,  the  Arab  calling  to  prayer. 
What  is  poetry  but  the  expression  of  emotion 
by  select  words  or  images  or  rhythms  charged 
with  that  emotion?  He  could  not  think  of 
images  more  profoundly  emotional  than  these 
pictures  of  man's  activity,  and  he  believed 
that  the  more  of  such  images  the  poem  con 
tained,  the  wider  and  stronger  its  appeal. 
That  his  theory  was  sound  enough  is  illus 
trated  by  those  humble  but  popular  lyrics 
which  in  every  language  speak  to  the  heart  by 
images  of  childhood — the  old  home,  mother 
and  father,  the  old  playground,  the  cradle, 
and  the  hearth.  If  these  family  images  grip 
the  imagination  of  the  family,  should  not  the 
race  images  grip  the  imagination  of  the  race? 
This  was  Whitman's  theory.  He  was  giving 
other  men  credit  for  a  sympathy  as  tireless 
as  his  own. 

But  this  sympathy,  which  was  his  natural 
gift,  was  powerfully  reinforced  by  modern 
science.  He  saw  all  life  unified  in  evolution, 
as  Emerson  saw  it  reposing  in  one  Over-Soul. 
Therefore  he  denied  any  distinction  of  hon 
or  ableness  between  higher  and  lower  forms, 
for  all  forms  are  in  the  eyes  of  science  equally 
transfigured  by  the  significance  of  life.  In  a 
sense  the  lower  biological  forms  are  more 
honorable  than  the  higher,  since  the  loss  of 
them  would  curtail  so  much  more  of  the  evo- 


218      GREAT  AMERICAN  WRITERS 

lutionary  process.  The  tree  can  spare  a 
blossom  better  than  a  root.  Therefore  no 
subject  in  human  life  was  for  Whitman  out 
lawed  from  the  realm  of  poetry.  Similarly 
he  denied  any  distinction  of  importance  be 
tween  body  and  soul,  since  their  mutual  de 
pendence,  so  far  as  human  life  is  concerned,  is 
so  close  as  to  imply  unity;  and  he  denied  any 
distinction  of  shame  between  one  function  of 
the  body  and  another,  or  between  the  exer 
cise  of  one  sense  or  another,  and  all  the  parts 
of  the  human  anatomy  he  held  to  be  equally 
decent,  since  the  whole  body  must  be  in 
harmony  with  itself  before  the  soul  can  prop 
erly  dwell  in  it. 

In  this  region  of  Whitman's  doctrine  his 
readers  have  found  most  offense.  Making 
all  allowance  for  his  theories,  they  feel  here 
that  he  shows  some  fundamental  lack  of 
fineness.  Obviously  his  sincere  willingness  to 
push  a  truth  to  its  conclusion  is  greater  than 
his  good  taste.  Yet  it  has  been  observed 
that  he  offends  only  against  the  taste  of  social 
convention;  he  is  altogether  proper  if  we 
allow  him  the  scientific  attitude  of  the  sur 
geon  or  the  biologist.  Perhaps  even  this 
defense,  however,  does  him  injustice,  for  with 
all  his  science  he  is  not  a  dissector  but  a  poet. 
He  believes  that  life,  at  least  in  its  highway, 
is  forever  ascending;  to  be  one  with  the  ulti- 


WALT  WHITMAN  219 

mate  good,  man  has  but  to  live  in  that  high 
way.  There  surely  will  be  found  all  the  ele 
mental  passions  and  capacities  of  life;  should 
we  distrust  or  condemn  anything  found  there? 
Whatever  in  this  highway  is  livable,  is  good, 
thinks  Whitman;  and  he  is  bold  indeed  who 
at  any  point  in  evolution  would  say  once  for  all 
what  is  evil  and  what  is  good.  That  this  doc 
trine  aims  at  the  root  of  much  conventional 
decency  and  morality  is  undeniable,  yet  the 
shock  it  gives  us  in  Whitman  is  more  of  taste 
than  of  thought;  for  we  escape  unshocked  from 
the  same  potential  ideas  in  Emerson's  Com 
pensation  and  in  Hawthorne's  Scarlet  Letter. 

After  dwelling  upon  this  aspect  of  Whit 
man,  it  is  hardly  necessary  to  say  that  his 
approach  to  truth  is  secular,  as  Emerson's  is 
religious;  science  for  Whitman  is  what  the 
ology  is  for  Emerson,  who,  though  he  learned 
from  science,  learned  only  what  could  be 
turned  to  moral  or  poetical  account.  But 
Whitman  caught  the  relentless  spirit  of  sci 
ence,  that  will  see  into  the  remotest  conclu 
sions  of  the  phenomenon,  and  he  revelled  in 
this  spirit  as  a  truth-lover  must.  Emerson's 
religion,  more  orthodox  religion,  his  own  sci 
ence,  another  man's  ignorance — all  these  were 
to  him  facts  of  life,  as  interesting  as  any  other 
facts,  and  similarly  fit  for  enthusiastic  con 
templation.  He  liked  his  science,  but  he 


220      GREAT  AMERICAN  WRITERS 

also  liked  Emerson's  religion.  He  did  not 
care  to  decide  whether  to  be  a  materialist  or 
an  idealist;  he  preferred  to  be  both.  Only 
one  idea  he  refused  to  entertain — the  idea  of 
death.  In  this  position  he  was  consciously 
logical;  for  he  had  set  the  standard  of  all 
things  in  the  stream  of  life,  and  if  this  stream 
should  for  any  one  cease,  what  would  become 
of  that  person's  standards?  Or  from  another 
angle,  if  the  soul  is  eternal,  there  is  no  death; 
and  if  matter  is  eternal,  if  there  is  nothing  else 
in  the  universe,  if  even  consciousness  is  mate 
rial,  how  can  we  be  more  dead  than  we  are 
now? 

"There  is  really  no  death; 

And  if  ever  there  was,  it  led  forward  life,  and 
does  not  wait  at  the  end  to  arrest  it, 

And  ceas'd  the  moment  life  appear'd. 

All  goes  onward  and  outward — no  thing  collapses; 

And  to  die  is  different  from  what  any  one  sup 
posed,  and  luckier. 

Has  any  one  supposed  it  lucky  to  be  born? 

I  hasten  to  inform  him  or  her,  it  is  just  as  lucky 
to  die,  and  I  know  it." 

If  Whitman  differs  from  Emerson  in  his 
passion  for  society  and  for  all  the  communal 
interests  of  man,  he  again  resembles  him  in 
his  wariness  of  the  past.  His  caution  is  far 
more  obvious,  however,  in  his  manner  than 
in  his  ideas,  for  his  robust  faith  in  the  new 


WALT  WHITMAN 

day  brushed  easily  aside  those  cobweb  bonds 
of  the  ancestors  from  which  Emerson  extri 
cated  himself  only  with  much  finesse.  It  was 
rather  in  the  language  of  his  poetry  that 
Whitman  was  on  his  guard  against  the  past. 
In  this  point  of  view  he  has  been  much  mis 
understood.  He  loved  the  classics  of  poetry, 
and  had  no  reform  to  make  in  any  past  age. 
He  did  not,  like  Wordsworth,  crusade  against 
artificial  diction,  nor  did  he  propose  for  him 
self  any  diction  notably  simple  or  natural; 
his  lines  are  full  of  unusual  words,  even  words 
from  other  languages.  But  he  did  intend,  for 
the  greater  clearness  of  his  message,  that  his 
language  and  his  diction  should  connote  no 
other  literature,  no  other  epoch,  than  that 
in  which  his  subject  at  the  moment  belonged. 
All  poetic  diction  takes  to  itself  through  con 
tinued  use  certain  suggestions  or  overtones, 
and  that  writer  would  be  maladroit  who  ex 
pressed  an  idea  in  diction  of  a  contrary  sug 
gestion.  The  diction  of  Keats  does  not  fit 
Mr.  Kipling's  ballads,  nor  would  the  diction 
of  those  ballads,  now  that  we  are  familiar 
with  them,  serve  easily  for  a  different  type  of 
subject.  Poetic  images  also — the  rose,  the 
stars,  the  moonlight — through  long  use  have 
been  burdened  with  certain  suggestions  not  to 
be  disregarded  by  the  poet  who  uses  them; 
they  help  him,  if  they  are  what  he  wishes  to 


222      GREAT  AMERICAN  WRITERS 

say,  but  they  contradict  him  if  he  has  a  dif 
ferent  intention.  And  rhythms  are  equally 
bound  up  with  moods  and  ideas.  Who  can 
be  bacchanalian  in  a  hymn  metre? 

Whitman  wished  to  express  the  prospect 
of  science,  the  prospect  of  democracy,  the 
future  of  man.  He  wished  his  verse  to  sug 
gest  novelty,  to  give  no  echo  of  any  other 
age,  not  because  he  disliked  the  other  ages, 
but  because  he  did  not  happen  to  be  living  in 
them.  He  therefore  framed  his  rhythms  on 
the  model  of  the  recitative  in  the  opera;  he 
made  the  rhythmic  scheme  conform  frankly 
to  the  thought.  It  may  be  that  his  love  of 
Ossian  or  of  the  Psalms  may  have  suggested 
his  grand  rhythms  rolling  freely  between 
prose  and  verse,  but  he  preferred  to  justify 
himself,  with  that  prophetic  sympathy  that 
he  often  showed,  by  the  development  of 
music  out  of  formal  periods  into  free  rhythms. 
Had  he  heard  the  most  modern  opera  or  seen 
the  most  modern  paintings,  he  would  have 
realized  the  fairness  of  his  prophecy.  He  has 
been  justified  also  by  the  failure  of  his  imi 
tators.  To  write  formless  lines  does  not 
assure  such  effects  as  he  gets,  not  even  if  the 
result  is  like  nothing  that  ever  was  before  in 
poetry.  What  makes  his  rhythms  so  wonder 
ful  is  that  they  do  convey  the  American 
spirit,  the  exhilaration  and  the  rush,  of  life, 


WALT  WHITMAN  223 

the  power  and  also  the  lack  of  proportion. 
The  expression  is  superlatively  honest.  He 
never  spoiled  a  true  idea  in  order  to  cramp 
it  into  a  preconceived  line  or  stanza.  If  he 
needed  further  justification,  he  seems  to  be 
getting  it  unexpectedly  in  our  day  from  the 
theory  of  esthetics  propounded  with  much 
fascination  by  Benedetto  Croce — a  theory 
which  makes  all  artistic  form  implicit  in  the 
idea.  That  Whitman  was  assured  of  his  place 
in  a  future  stage  of  thought  and  art,  is  clear 
in  many  a  curious  passage.  "You  who  cele 
brate  bygones,"  he  says  to  the  historians,  "I 
project  the  history  of  the  future";  and  in  the 
most  explicit  passage, 

"Poets   to   come!   orators,   singers,   musicians  to 

come! 
Not  to-day  is  to  justify  me,  and  answer  what  I 

am  for; 

But   you,  a  new   brood,  native,  athletic,   con 
tinental,  greater  than  before  known, 
Arouse!    Arouse!  —  for  you  must  justify  me  — 

you  must  answer. 
I  myself  but  write  one  or  two  indicative  words 

for  the  future, 
I  but  advance  a  moment,  only  to  wheel  and 

hurry  back  in  the  darkness. 
I   am  a  man  who,   sauntering  along,   without 

fully   stopping,   turns  a  casual  look  upon 

you,  and  then  averts  his  face, 
Leaving  it  to  you  to  prove  and  define  it, 
Expecting  the  main  things  from  you." 


224      GREAT  AMERICAN  WRITERS 

Evidently  Whitman  was  in  the  highest  de 
gree  a  theorizer  about  life  and  art.  To 
prove  his  point  he  sometimes  pressed  it  too 
far,  as  many  another  enthusiast  has  done. 
But  it  is  altogether  to  his  credit  that  his  en 
thusiasms  led  consistently  to  the  central  in 
terests  of  life,  rather  than  to  the  outer 
marshes  of  fanaticism.  The  Civil  War  put 
him  and  his  theories  to  the  test,  and  revealed 
both  at  their  noblest.  How  broad  his  sym 
pathies  were  is  shown  by  contrast  with  the 
nobly  imaginative  but  partisan  war  lyrics  of 
Henry  Howard  Brownell  (1820-1872).  Whit 
man  was  a  true  patriot,  loving  the  soil  with  all 
but  religious  fervor,  and  his  theory  made  him 
a  hater  of  slavery.  He  had,  however,  a  more 
just  sense  of  the  importance  of  the  slave 
question  and  the  war  than  many  of  his  con 
temporaries,  and  wherever  he  touches  the 
subject  he  rises  to  a  high  seriousness  which 
permits  none  of  his  usual  lapses  of  taste.  In 
much  of  his  other  work  he  had  been  illus 
trating  a  hobby,  and  at  times  we  must  for 
give  him,  as  for  similar  reasons  we  sometimes 
must  forgive  Wordsworth.  But  in  all  the 
poems  dealing  with  the  war  he  lost  himself 
in  the  great  moment.  The  significance  which 
he  attached  to  slavery  is  shown  in  "  I  sing 
the  body  electric,"  first  published  in  1855. 
He  describes  a  man's  body  at  auction,  and 


WALT  WHITMAN  225 

chides  the  auctioneer  for  missing  the  chief 
values  of  that  body,  for  which  "the  globe  lay 
preparing  quintillions  of  years,  without  one 
animal  or  plant";  and  "the  revolving  cycles 
truly  and  steadily  rolled."  This  is  not  only 
one  man,  he  says;  this  is  the  father  of  those 
who  shall  be  fathers  in  their  turns.  "How 
do  you  know  who  shall  come  from  the  off 
spring  of  his  offspring  through  the  centuries? 
Who  might  you  find  you  have  come  from 
yourself  if  you  could  trace  back  through  the 
centuries?"  Whitman  never  lost  this  grip 
on  the  significance  of  the  crisis;  it  is  stated 
with  haunting  picturesqueness  in  Ethiopia 
saluting  the  colors,  and  in  many  another  poem. 
The  war  songs  are  full  of  it,  even  when  he 
turns  aside  for  the  moment  to  fix  the  memory 
of  the  cavalry  crossing  the  ford,  a  superb  war 
picture,  or  more  powerfully  to  record  the 
heroic  agonies  and  comfortings  he  witnessed 
among  the  wounded.  To  see  what  new 
poetry  America  through  him  was  giving  the 
world,  we  have  but  to  compare  the  lost  bat 
tlefield  in  Tennyson's  Passing  of  Arthur  with 
such  poems  as  A  sight  in  the  camp  in  the  day- 
break,  Vigil  strange  I  kept,  and  Look  down, 
fair  moon.  But  even  from  such  pictures 
Whitman  recurs  to  the  central  idea  of  the 
significance  of  the  war,  and  the  climax  of  all 
these  poems  is  the  Spirit  whose  work  is  done, 


226      GREAT  AMERICAN  WRITERS 

in  which  he  prays  that  the  majestic  battle 
spirit  may  be  eternal  in  his  songs. 

Against  this  epic  conception  of  the  war  the 
two  great  poems  on  Lincoln  stand  out,  the 
finest  of  American  elegies.  Captain,  My 
Captain  is  naturally  better  known,  for  it  has 
the  advantage  of  conciseness  and  vivid  feel 
ing,  but  When  lilacs  last  in  the  dooryard 
bloomed  is  equally  interesting  in  other  ways, 
perhaps  for  a  different  audience.  Whitman 
summons  in  it  his  generous  philosophy  of 
life  to  comfort  him  in  a  personal  grief,  where 
in  the  other  poem  he  was  only  stating  that 
grief.  Both  elegies  are  more  full  of  echoes 
than  he  usually  permits  his  work  to  be,  but 
the  subject  was  not  one  of  novelty  in  man's 
long  record. 

Aside  from  the  war  poems,  in  which  the 
subject  was  given  to  him  by  fate,  it  needs  no 
argument  to  suggest  that  Whitman's  genius 
would  naturally  express  itself  in  celebration 
of  nature  in  her  larger  aspects.  No  poetic 
medium  could  be  imagined  better  fitted  to 
deal  with  prairies  and  rough  mountain  country 
and  uncouth  towns  than  his  all-but-formless 
rhythms.  He  differs  from  other  nature- 
lovers  in  American  or  perhaps  any  other 
literature,  in  that  he  seems  to  have  loved  all 
portions  of  nature  equally.  He  liked  the  moun 
tains  and  the  sea,  but  he  did  not  prefer  them 


WALT  WHITMAN  227 

to  the  inland  plains.  He  found  his  joy  in  the 
cities  as  well  as  in  the  woods.  At  least  he 
tried  to  love  nature  without  distinction.  But 
his  happiest  nature  poems,  in  the  opinion  of 
most  of  his  readers,  describe  the  sea.  Out  of 
the  cradle  endlessly  rocking,  and  the  other 
poems  entitled  Sea  Shore  Memories,  and  the 
many  poems  of  the  soul  in  which  the  sea 
occurs  as  an  image,  make  up  a  group  that  is 
obscured  in  Whitman's  total  work  only  be 
cause  his  best  is  so  fine. 

Whitman  cannot  be  fully  understood  with 
out  an  acquaintance  with  his  prose,  which 
reveals  a  character  consistent  with  the  noblest 
of  the  poetry,  and  sometimes,  as  in  his  record 
of  his  war  experiences,  a  character  even 
nobler  than  his  best  poem.  It  is  probably  too 
early  to  judge  a  man  whose  work,  as  he  knew, 
was  prophetic.  How  far  his  life  conditioned 
his  philosophy  or  his  philosophy  his  conduct, 
no  one  can  say.  It  appears,  however,  that 
time  is  dealing  kindly  with  all  sides  of  his 
reputation.  Some  things  that  he  accom 
plished  for  American  poetry  are  already 
fairly  clear;  he  is  the  bard  of  industry,  en 
ergy,  and  power;  on  his  cruder  side  he  has 
been  said  to  be  the  mouthpiece  of  that  stren- 
uousness  which  for  many  Americans  has  been 
an  attractive  ideal.  More  nobly,  he  voices 
the  hope  of  the  lower  classes,  the  emigrant 


228      GREAT  AMERICAN  WRITERS 

hope,  of  the  United  States;  he  sings  of  de 
mocracy  as  a  means  of  rescue  for  all  fallen 
men;  he  is  always  bidding  man  stand  up 
right.  And  in  his  view  of  life  he  is  the  largest 
account  that  America  has  given  of  herself  to 
the  world;  she  has  not  yet  grown  up  to  his 
vague  but  gorgeous  dreams  of  her.  In  the 
old  world  too  he  has  had  a  career;  no  revolu 
tion  that  purposes  to  better  human  condi 
tions  is  likely  to  fail  of  finding  its  text  in  him. 
But  with  that  reform  which  proposes  an  im 
mediate  end  he  has  little  in  common;  the 
truth  of  life,  for  him  as  for  Emerson,  is 
strictly,  mathematically,  in  infinities. 

"This  day  before  dawn  I  ascended  a  hill,  and 

look'd  at  the  crowded  heaven, 
And  I  said  to  my  Spirit,  When  we  become  the 

enf aiders  of  those  orbs,  and  the  pleasure  and 

knowledge   of  everything  in  them,  shall  we 

be  filled  and  satisfied  then  ? 
And  my  Spirit  said,  No,  we  but  level  that   lift, 

to  pass  and  continue  beyond." 

Whitman's  genius  was  helped  rather  than 
hindered  by  the  war;  but  if  that  terrible 
struggle  furnished  his  titan  soul  with  inspira 
tion,  it  also  overwhelmed  many  a  more  re 
fined  and  sensitive  spirit.  Certainly  it  crip 
pled  the  work  of  Paul  Hamilton  Hayne  (1830- 
1886),  and  literally  shortened  the  life  of 
Henry  Timrod  (1829-1867).  These  two  bril- 


WALT  WHITMAN  229 

liant  friends,  both  born  in  Charleston,  South 
Carolina,  are  still  the  best  remembered  of 
the  young  admirers  and  followers  of  Simms. 
Like  him  they  held  to  the  politer  traditions  of 
English  poetry;  in  their  verse  the  courtly 
graces  of  the  fated  social  order  which  they 
represented,  had  almost  its  last  expression. 

In  the  North  the  chief  poetic  reputation 
after  the  war  was  that  of  the  Pennsylvanian, 
Bayard  Taylor  (1825-1878),  who  though  he 
began  to  publish  verse  in  1844,  was  princi 
pally  known  as  a  traveller  and  writer  upon 
travel,  until  1870  and  1871,  when  the  two 
parts  of  his  fine  translation  of  Faust  were 
published.  This  is  still  the  best  poetic  trans 
lation  that  has  been  made  by  an  American, 
not  excepting  Bryant's  Homer  and  Long 
fellow's  Dante;  and  though  some  of  Taylor's 
oriental  lyrics,  such  as  the  familiar  From  the 
desert  I  come  to  thee,  have  kept  their  popu 
larity  in  musical  settings,  it  is  on  the  Faust 
that  his  fame  rests.  In  recognition  of  his 
achievement  he  was  made  minister  to  Ger 
many  in  February,  1878,  but  died  suddenly 
in  Berlin  in  December  of  that  year. 

A  far  more  original  poet  than  Taylor  was 
his  friend  Sidney  Lanier  (1842-1881).  Bom 
in  Georgia,  Lanier  had  discovered  his  genius 
for  music,  had  been  graduated  from  Ogle- 
thorpe  College  and  was  teaching  in  that  in- 


230      GREAT  AMERICAN  WRITERS 

stitution,  before  the  war  broke  out.  He  took 
an  active  part  on  the  Southern  side,  and  was 
captured  and  imprisoned.  When  he  was  re 
leased  at  the  end  of  the  war  his  sufferings  had 
ruined  his  health,  and  he  soon  found  himself 
a  hopeless  consumptive.  It  was  after  he 
realized  that  he  could  only  postpone  the  end 
that  he  made  his  reputation  as  poet  and  critic, 
with  a  volume  of  verse  in  1877,  The  Science 
of  English  Verse,  1880,  and  a  series  of  lectures 
on  the  English  novel  published  posthumously 
in  1883.  His  musical  and  literary  work  was 
done  chiefly  in  Baltimore,  where  he  played 
the  flute  in  the  Peabody  Symphony  Concerts, 
gave  lectures  to  private  classes,  and  lectured 
before  the  Johns  Hopkins  University;  but  he 
made  visits  to  the  North,  and  was  obliged  to 
travel  in  the  South  and  West  in  search  of 
health.  He  died  in  North  Carolina. 

His  poetry  takes  its  quality  from  his  knowl 
edge  of  music  and  from  his  theories  of  the  inti 
mate  relation  of  the  two  arts.  Perhaps  it 
would  be  accurate  to  speak  of  him  as  practis 
ing  three  arts,  for  his  verse  abounds  in  color, 
and  he  puts  the  painter's  eye  and  the  musi 
cian's  ear  at  the  service  of  poetry.  His  longer 
poems,  such  as  Sunrise,  The  Marshes  of  Glynn, 
and  Corn,  suggest  in  their  stately  development 
the  symphony  or  the  sonata.  His  fame,  how 
ever,  is  confined  more  and  more  to  a  few 


BRET  HARTE  AND   MARK  TWAIN   231 

affectionately  remembered  short  pieces,  nota 
bly  the  Ballad  of  Trees  and  the  Master. 

Of  later  poets  it  would  be  difficult  to  choose 
among  Edward  Rowland  Sill  (1841-1887)  and 
four  recently  dead — Edmund  Clarence  Sted- 
man,  Thomas  Bailey  Aldrich,  John  Banister 
Tabb,  and  Richard  Watson  Gilder.  Sill's 
work  was  at  times  imaginative  and  large; 
Stedman  was  a  sort  of  patriot  of  poetry,  serv 
ing  with  his  own  lyrics  and  his  criticisms  and 
his  anthologies  all  the  causes  of  the  muse;  Al 
drich  and  Tabb  were  such  masters  of  technicas 
America  has  not  produced  since  Poe;  Gilder 
made  his  sincere  and  simple  lyric  gift  count 
powerfully  for  the  public  good.  If  this  survey 
of  American  verse  must  pause  with  them,  and 
if  no  final  judgment  of  them  is  yet  possible, 
they  at  least  show  how  high  and  untarnished 
the  democracy  holds  the  poetic  ideals  be 
queathed  to  it. 

CHAPTER  XII 

BRET   HARTE   AND   MARK   TWAIN 

AMERICAN  literature  has  had  a  sort  of  fron 
tier  throughout  the  nineteenth  century,  in 
which  a  rough  kind  of  humor  has  flourished. 
Other  qualities  also  have  distinguished  it;  it 
has  been  an  interesting  if  not  highly  artistic 


232      GREAT  AMERICAN  WRITERS 

record  of  the  oddities  turned  up  by  a  rapidly 
moving  civilization;  it  has  preserved  espe 
cially  that  cheerful  optimism  which  conditions 
and  results  from  such  rapid  progress.  This 
type  of  book  on  the  borderland  of  American 
literature  is  illustrated  by  Augustus  Baldwin 
Longstreet's  Georgia  Scenes,  1840;  William 
Tappan  Thompson's  Major  Jones9  Court 
ship,  1840,  a  similar  book  of  broad  humor, 
also  by  a  Georgian;  Johnson  Jones  Hooper's 
Adventures  of  Captain  Simon  Suggs,  1846; 
and  Joseph  Glover  Baldwin's  Flush  Times 
of  Alabama  and  Mississippi.  These  examples 
all  have  to  do  with  the  South  and  Southwest; 
the  West  was  made  similarly  the  subject  of 
humor  by  Captain  George  Horatio  Derby — 
"John  Phoenix" — a  Massachusetts  man  who 
had  explored  the  West.  His  sketches  were 
published  in  1855  under  the  title  of  'Phoe- 
nixiana.  All  this  body  of  writing  disappeared 
properly  enough,  after  it  had  served  its 
ephemeral  purpose,  but  it  is  still  important 
as  the  background  of  American  humor 
to-day.  Especially  does  it  serve  as  an  intro 
duction  to  Bret  Harte  and  to  Mark  Twain, 
whose  superior  genius  supplanted  it  and 
helped  to  render  it  forgotten. 

Francis  Bret  Harte  was  born  in  Albany, 
New  York,  August  25,  1839.  His  father 
was  teacher  of  Greek  in  a  local  seminary; 


BRET  HARTE  AND  MARK  TWAIN    233 

of  his  mother's  temperament  and  tastes  we 
know  that  she  was  enterprising  enough  to 
accompany  her  son  later  to  California.  Of 
his  ancestry  further  it  is  enough  to  say  that 
he  was  of  English,  German,  and  Hebrew 
blood,  and  that  his  father  was  a  Roman 
Catholic  and  his  mother  a  Protestant.  His 
Americanism  is  chiefly  in  his  writings.  His 
boyhood  was  of  a  piece  with  his  later  life, 
somewhat  aimless.  His  health  was  not  good, 
and  he  used  that  fact  to  escape  much  regular 
study,  but  he  read  in  the  standard  novelists 
and  fell  in  love  with  Dickens. 

In  1856  he  went  with  his  mother  to  Cali 
fornia.  It  is  not  clear  why  he  went,  unless 
the  general  quest  for  gold  in  the  new  country 
may  be  taken  as  reason  enough;  if  that  was 
his  motive  he  certainly  soon  recovered  from 
any  intention  of  being  a  miner — or  perhaps 
he  had  persuasions  now  unknown  for  trying 
other  careers.  He  was  successively  an  express 
company  messenger,  a  drug  clerk,  a  printer, 
a  school  teacher,  and  an  Indian  fighter.  In 
none  of  these  functions  did  he  achieve 
financial  success,  yet  he  seems  to  have  given 
up  each  under  some  form  of  compulsion.  The 
drug  business  ceased  to  be  interesting  after 
he  had  nearly  killed  a  patient  by  a  mistake 
in  filling  a  prescription,  and  the  school  had 
to  be  closed  because  most  of  the  children 


234      GREAT  AMERICAN  WRITERS 

moved  away.  If  this  record  of  his  Cali 
fornia  beginnings  seems  discreditable,  per 
haps  we  should  remember  that  he  tells  it 
himself,  and  he  may  have  stretched  a  point 
or  two  at  his  own  expense  for  the  story's 
sake. 

His  permanent  success  began  in  1862, 
when  he  was  appointed  secretary  to  the 
Superintendent  of  the  Mint  in  San  Fran 
cisco.  In  this  year  also  he  had  married  Miss 
Anna  Griswold,  and  the  miscellaneous  writing 
that  had  made  him  known  in  the  local  papers 
already  encouraged  him  to  think  of  a  literary 
career.  So  much  did  he  think  of  it  that  his 
position  in  the  Mint  must  have  been  a  sin 
ecure.  It  was  during  this  period  of  established 
leisure  that  he  published  his  Condensed 
Novels  in  The  Golden  Era,  and  made  friends 
of  Mark  Twain,  of  Charles  Webb,  who  owned 
and  edited  The  Californian,  founded  in  1864, 
and  of  Charles  Warren  Stoddard,  the  author 
of  South  Sea  Idyls.  He  also  edited  a  collec 
tion  of  Western  verse,  which  he  has  immor 
talized  in  his  account  of  his  critics  in  My 
First  Book.  In  1865  he  published  a  volume 
of  his  own  verse,  The  Lost  Galleon.  His 
reputation  grew  so  rapidly,  in  a  community 
where  any  great  literary  skill  would  have 
few  rivals,  that  in  1868,  when  Anton  Roman, 
a  San  Francisco  bookseller  and  publisher, 


BRET  HARTE  AND  MARK  TWAIN    235 

founded  a  new  magazine  called  The  Over 
land  Monthly,  Bret  Harte  became  its  editor. 
To  its  first  number,  in  July,  he  contributed 
a  poem;  in  the  second  number  he  printed 
The  Luck  of  Roaring  Camp. 

His  account  of  the  difficulties  of  getting 
this  famous  story  through  his  own  press  is 
in  itself  a  commentary  on  some  contested 
points  of  his  reputation.  Many  a  loyal 
Californian  has  insisted  that  such  a  picture 
as  is  given  in  The  Luck  of  Roaring  Camp  is 
untrue;  however  alluring  the  picture,  Cali 
fornia  was  never  so  primitive  nor  so  uncon 
ventional.  These  protests  usually  have 
come  from  San  Franciscans,  whose  natural 
pride  in  their  city  made  them  frown  on  any 
thing  less  respectable  and  proper  than  the 
Eastern  civilization  would  admit.  Indeed, 
the  Western  city,  true  to  the  common  be 
havior  of  provincialism,  was  far  stricter  in 
its  propriety  than  the  East.  Bret  Harte's 
story  of  the  mining  camp,  therefore,  shocked 
his  associates  on  The  Overland  Monthly.  The 
publisher  in  dismay  and  anxiety  notified 
him  that  in  the  printer's  opinion  the  story 
was  "indecent,  irreligious,  and  improper," 
and  that  the  proofreader — a  young  lady — 
"had  with  difficulty  been  induced  to  continue 
its  perusal."  Bret  Harte  insisted,  however, 
on  printing  the  story  as  he  had  written  it, 


236      GREAT  AMERICAN  WRITERS 

and  the  publisher  consented  rather  than 
accept  the  editor's  resignation,  which  was 
the  alternative.  When  the  story  appeared, 
"the  secular  press,"  the  author  tells  us, 
"received  it  coldly  and  referred  to  its  'sin 
gularity';  the  religious  press  frantically 
excommunicated  it,  and  anathematized  it 
as  the  offspring  of  evil;  the  high  promise  of 
The  Overland  Monthly  was  said  to  have  been 
ruined  by  its  birth;  Christians  were  cau 
tioned  against  pollution  by  its  contact; 
practical  business  men  were  gravely  urged 
to  condemn  and  frown  upon  this  picture  of 
Californian  society  that  was  not  conducive 
to  Eastern  immigration;  its  hapless  author 
was  held  up  to  obloquy  as  a  man  who  had 
abused  a  sacred  trust. 

The  local  criticism  suffered  a  dramatic 
rebuke  when  the  first  mail  from  the  East 
brought  a  letter  from  The  Atlantic  Monthly, 
requesting  the  delighted  author  to  furnish 
that  periodical  with  more  stories  like  The 
Luck  of  Roaring  Camp.  Within  a  year  he 
wrote  and  published  The  Outcasts  of  Poker 
Flat,  Tennessee's  Partner,  and  other  well- 
known  tales,  and  collected  them  all  in  a 
volume  called  The  Luck  of  Roaring  Camp  and 
other  Sketches.  His  growing  reputation  came 
to  its  first  climax  in  1870,  when  The  Hea 
then  Chinee  appeared  in  his  magazine.  For 


BRET  HARTE  AND  MARK  TWAIN    237 

this  clever  piece  he  never  cared  greatly;  he 
had  written  it  for  the  sake  of  burlesquing 
the  metre  of  the  antiphonal  dirge  at  the  end 
of  Swinburne's  Atalanta  in  Calydon.  But 
his  Eastern  readers  placed  a  higher  value 
on  the  poem,  and  their  applause  was  equiva 
lent  to  an  invitation  to  return  to  his  own 
part  of  the  country.  He  therefore  recrossed 
the  continent  in  1871,  in  a  sort  of  triumphal 
progress,  and  with  his  attractive  manners 
and  handsome  appearance  he  justified  the 
romantic  notion  of  him  that  his  readers  had 
formed.  For  the  moment  he  became  a  sort 
of  national  hero,  and  the  critics  in  France, 
England,  and  Germany  read  and  approved 
his  stories  with  less  condescension  than 
they  usually  had  for  new  American  authors. 
There  can  hardly  be  two  opinions  as  to 
Bret  Harte's  mistake  in  leaving  the  West. 
The  older  part  of  the  country  had  nothing 
to  give  him  but  flattery,  and  that  his  nature 
was  better  without.  He  seems  not  to  have 
realized  that  his  genius  was  limited  to  the 
Western  scene;  when  he  ventured  into  other 
phases  of  life,  as  in  Thankful  Blossom,  he 
failed.  Something  in  the  eventful,  irrespon 
sible  world  of  the  forty-niners,  which  he 
knew  or  thought  he  knew,  called  out  his 
ability  by  a  magic  summons.  Anything 
worth  while  that  he  wrote  after  coming  East 


238      GREAT  AMERICAN  WRITERS 

was  drawn  from  the  stock  of  old  memories; 
he  could  say  nothing  new. 

The  praise  that  welcomed  him  he  mistook 
for  prosperity.  A  spirit  less  steady  might 
have  been  dazzled  by  such  prospects.  He 
was  invited  to  dramatize  his  stories,  he  was 
retained  to  write  for  magazines,  he  was 
encouraged  to  submit  new  books  to  the 
publishers;  and  he  felt  safe,  apparently,  in 
living  beyond  his  means  and  almost  up  to 
his  prospects.  He  made  his  home  in  New 
York  at  first,  later  in  Morristown,  New 
Jersey,  but  his  summers  he  passed  at  expen 
sive  places,  like  Newport  or  Lenox;  and 
meanwhile  the  quality  of  his  work  fell  off; 
his  dramatization  for  Stuart  Robson  was  a 
failure,  his  long  novel,  Gabriel  Conroy,  was 
uninteresting,  and  the  hoped-for  contribu 
tions  to  the  magazines  did  not  get  written. 
At  least  the  stories  of  him  that  linger  in  the 
old  magazine  offices  are  all  in  one  tone  of 
disappointed  hope.  His  memory  has  had  its 
loyal  defenders;  some  of  his  friends  have 
tried  to  prove  that  he  did  settle  his  bills  and 
conduct  his  affairs  efficiently.  But  after  an 
attempt  at  lecturing,  which  succeeded  only 
at  first,  he  was  glad  to  turn  to  a  government 
post  at  Crefeld,  Prussia. 

He  never  saw  his  country  again — not  that 
his  duties  abroad  proved  interesting  or  con- 


BRET  HARTE  AND  MARK  TWAIN    239 

fining,  but  because  he  had  become  hope 
lessly  unsettled.  He  found  his  work  at  Cre- 
feld  irksome,  and  spent  much  of  his  time 
visiting  in  England,  where  he  had  many 
friends.  At  first  he  was  received  as  a  literary 
lion;  then  he  attempted  to  turn  his  popu 
larity  into  cash  by  a  lecturing  tour,  and  on 
this  footing  found  the  English  less  hospi 
table.  A  second  similar  attempt  proved  more 
remunerative,  but  on  the  whole  England, 
like  the  Eastern  part  of  America,  grew  tired 
of  him.  As  he  stayed  in  England,  however, 
the  largest  part  of  his  time,  his  government 
seems  to  have  had  so  keen  a  sense  of  humor 
as  to  transfer  him  to  a  post  from  which  at 
least  he  would  not  be  absent  so  far,  and  in 
1880  he  was  made  consul  at  Glasgow.  He 
liked  to  tell  how,  when  his  inquisitive  Scotch 
landlady  looked  over  his  luggage,  she  sternly 
asked  where  was  his  Bible.  But  she  prob 
ably  held  few  conversations  with  him. 
After  five  years  of  good  company  in  England 
and  considerable  contribution  to  the  Amer 
ican  magazines,  Bret  Harte  was  removed 
by  the  Washington  authorities,  who  had  the 
impression  that  he  neglected  his  duties.  His 
life  continued  much  as  before,  until  he  died, 
May  5,  1902,  in  the  home  of  one  of  his 
friends  at  Camberley,  Surrey. 

The  tragic  decline  of  Bret  Harte's  char- 


240      GREAT  AMERICAN  WRITERS 

acter  has  affected  his  reputation  at  home 
less  than  might  have  been  expected  of  a 
country  that  makes  Poe's  writings  bear  the 
blame  of  his  conduct.  One  explanation  is 
that  Bret  Harte's  failings  were  not  so  well 
known;  but  a  deeper  reason  is  that  his 
best  work  lay  in  an  ungoverned  region  of 
society,  and  some  wildness  in  his  reputation 
would  seem  to  be  a  mere  dressing  of  the  part. 
The  world  of  the  miners,  in  which  floods  and 
explosions  and  snow  storms  claim  victims 
at  any  moment,  or  reckless  shootings  and 
well-meant  but  sometimes  mistaken  hangings 
have  a  depopulating  effect  so  normal  as  to 
imply  a  law  of  nature, — this  world  of  luck 
was  so  perfect  a  field  for  Bret  Harte's  gifts, 
that  there  will  always  be  some  sympathy 
with  those  who  from  the  first  claimed  that 
his  gifts  invented  the  field.  He  was  senti 
mental  and  melodramatic,  and  he  could  unfold 
a  situation  better  than  he  could  solve  it;  he 
usually  needs  a  convulsion  of  nature  to  end 
his  stories.  The  reason  for  his  failure  in 
subjects  from  normal  life  is  therefore  obvious, 
and  equally  clear  is  the  cause  of  his  success 
in  a  world  where  convulsions  of  nature  happen 
every  day.  Accident  was  a  normal,  even 
inevitable,  thing  in  the  mining  camp  and 
the  frontier  towns;  when  he  uses  good 
or  bad  fortune  to  solve  his  problems,  the 


BRET  IIARTE  AND  MARK  TWAIN    241 

effect  is  as  though  he  were  straining  for  real 
ism.  The  sentimentality  also,  which  would 
be  rather  watery  in  a  representation  of  hum 
drum  existence,  is  necessary  in  such  stern 
crises  as  his  Western  stories  are  built  on; 
experience  so  grim  develops  sentimentality 
to  make  it  livable.  Where  Bret  Harte 
stepped  out  of  this  subject  matter,  however, 
he  seemed  but  a  poor  imitator  of  Dickens. 

Because  the  typical  subject  of  his  stories 
is  laid  in  such  a  world  of  accident,  it  is  com 
paratively  easy  for  Bret  Harte  to  transcribe 
actual  occurrences;  for  the  difference  between 
a  "true  story"  and  a  story  acceptable  as 
art  is  usually  that  art  demands  a  reasoned 
solution,  an  intelligent  ordering  of  what 
were  crude  facts.  But  where  truth  to  life 
demands  a  departure  from  this  kind  of  art, 
the  writer  can  safely  do  without  the  mathe 
matical  conscience  of  a  Poe,  or  the  moral 
justice  of  a  Hawthorne,  and  still  seem  true; 
for  whatever  happens  will  have  in  it  a  sort 
of  fatalism  superior  to  literary  craft.  Ten 
nessee's  Partner  is  a  true  story,  and  it  has 
the  utmost  of  the  unexpected  and  the  acci 
dental;  yet  it  is  full  of  fate  also,  and  few  of 
Bret  Harte's  tales  are  so  finely  sentimental. 
When  Clara  Morris  on  the  stage  wanted  to 
shed  tears,  she  used  to  think  of  this  story. 

If  Bret  Harte  had  to  make  little  change 


242      GREAT  AMERICAN  WRITERS 

in  the  real  incident  to  make  it  serve  as  a 
plot,  he  was  also  fortunate  in  having  char 
acters  ready  to  his  hand.  Even  more  than 
the  frontier  of  Cooper,  the  mining-camp  was 
a  sieve  as  well  as  a  sink  of  personalities,  and 
the  residuum  were  as  strong  and  well-defined 
as  could  be  wished.  They  were  all  cool, 
resourceful,  and  fatalistic — so  much  uni 
formity  their  life  forced  upon  them;  but  in 
other  respects  they  developed  extravagant 
forms  of  personality.  Good  and  bad  were 
mixed;  they  came  from  the  ends  of  the  earth, 
every  man  with  his  own  secret,  which  it 
was  not  good  form  to  enquire  into;  and  each 
within  his  own  character  was  a  paradox. 
"The  greatest  scamp  had  a  Raphael  face, 
with  a  profusion  of  blonde  hair;  Oakhurst, 
a  gambler,  had  the  melancholy  air  and 
intellectual  abstraction  of  a  Hamlet;  the 
coolest  and  most  courageous  man  was 
scarcely  over  five  feet  in  height,  with  a  soft 
voice  and  an  embarrassed,  timid  manner. 
The  term  'roughs'  applied  to  them  was  a 
distinction  rather  than  a  definition.  Per 
haps  in  the  minor  details  of  fingers,  toes, 
ears,  etc.,  the  camp  may  have  been  deficient, 
but  these  slight  omissions  did  not  detract 
from  their  aggregate  force.  The  strongest 
man  had  but  three  fingers  on  his  right  hand; 
the  best  shot  had  but  one  eye." 


BRET  HAUTE  AND  MARK  TWAIN    243 

It  is  obvious  that  a  world  of  such  incon 
gruities  will  furnish  inspiration  to  the  humor 
ist,  and  Bret  Harte's  reputation  is  best  sub 
stantiated  by  his  humor.  Whatever  his 
craft  of  plot-making  might  lack,  he  had  the 
eye  and  the  heart  for  all  humorous  possi 
bilities.  His  fun  is  of  a  more  restrained 
kind  than  most  American  joking;  he  has 
been  eclipsed  among  general  readers  by 
Mark  Twain,  for  example,  whose  force  is 
often  greater  but  his  delicacy  much  less. 
Harte  was  willing  to  leave  humor  where  he 
found  it,  in  its  natural  setting  of  life,  part  of 
the  characters,  not  greatly  magnified  or 
relieved  by  exaggeration.  In  spite  of  his 
very  local  subjects,  in  his  fine  restraint  he 
often  seems  closer  to  the  English  humorists 
than  to  any  of  his  countrymen.  The  opening 
of  Mr.  Thompson's  Prodigal  illustrates  this 
quality.  "We  all  knew  that  Mr.  Thompson 
was  looking  for  his  son,  and  a  pretty  bad  one 
at  that.  That  he  was  coming  to  California 
for  this  sole  object  was  no  secret  to  his 
fellow-passengers;  and  the  physical  pecul 
iarities  as  well  as  moral  weaknesses  of  the 
missing  prodigal  were  made  equally  plain 
to  us  through  the  frank  volubility  of  the 
parent.  'You  was  speaking  of  a  young 
man  which  was  hung  at  Red  Dog  for  sluice- 
robbing,'  said  Mr.  Thompson  to  a  steerage 


244      GREAT  AMERICAN  WRITERS 

passenger  one  day;  'be  you  aware  of  the 
color  of  his  eyes?'  'Black,'  responded  the 
passenger.  'Ah!'  said  Mr.  Thompson,  re 
ferring  to  some  mental  memoranda, '  Charles's 
eyes  was  bhie. ' "  * 

But  it  is  convenient  here  to  pass  from 
Bret  Harte  to  Samuel  Langhorne  Clemens, 
whom  Americans  always  speak  of  as  Mark 
Twain.  His  death  at  a  good  age  is  so  recent 
that  no  summary  valuation  of  his  work, 
unless  it  take  the  form  of  eulogy,  is  likely  to 
satisfy  his  countrymen,  and  any  detailed 
comparison  of  his  position  in  latter-day 
American  literature  with  that  attained  by 
some  of  his  eminent  contemporaries  still 
fortunately  living,  such  as  Mr.  Howells 
and  Mr.  Henry  James,  would  be  equally 
unsatisfactory.  His  humor  had  its  roots  in 
the  same  rough  frontier  of  literature  as  Bret 
Harte's,  and  he  never  allowed  its  original 
sturdiness  or  violence  to  be  much  toned 
down.  He  seems  to  foreign  countries  to 
represent  the  typical  American  humor,  be- 

1  If  space  permitted,  an  adequate  record  should  be  made  of 
the'  further  literary  history  of  the  South  and  West.  Of  late 
years  a  large  number  of  writers  have  caught  and  preserved 
vanishing  phases  of  Southern  life;  not  the  least  loved  of  these 
authors  is  the  late  Joel  Chandler  Harris,  whose  stories  of 
negro  folklore  have  become  almost  household  classics  in  the 
United  States.  Were  not  Mr.  George  W.  Cable  still  fortu 
nately  among  us,  an  extended  reckoning  would  have  to  be 
made  of  his  charming  stories  of  Creole  life  in  New  Orleans. 


BRET  HARTE  AND  MARK  TWAIN    245 

cause  in  much  of  his  work  he  delights  in 
extravagant  contrasts,  exaggerations,  and 
absurdities;  and  that  sort  of  taste  is  to  be 
expected  of  a  wild  country.  The  foreign 
opinion  of  American  humor  was  correct  when 
it  was  first  formed,  seventy-five  years  ago; 
it  was  correct  when  Artemus  Ward  (Charles 
Farrar  Browne)  made  London  laugh,  and 
it  was  correct  when  Mark  Twain  began 
to  delight  his  countrymen  with  the  story 
of  the  Jumping  Frog — the  story  which  he 
recited  to  Bret  Harte.  But  of  late  decades 
it  has  been  pathetically  clear  that  Ameri 
cans  have  developed  past  their  taste  for 
Mark  Twain's  type  of  fun-making,  and  if 
they  have  remained  his  ardent  and  grateful 
admirers  in  spite  of  that  change,  the  tribute 
has  been  rather  to  his  manly  character  than 
to  his  writing. 

He  was  born  in  humble  circumstances  in 
Florida,  Missouri,  November  30,  1835.  From 
his  father,  who  combined  a  law  practice  with 
trade,  he  is  thought  to  have  inherited  those 
visionary  tendencies  which  he  represented  in 
his  famous  Colonel  Mulberry  Sellars.  In  Han 
nibal,  Missouri,  where  the  family  were  already 
living  when  the  father  died  in  1847,  Mark 
Twain  began  his  varied  career  with  some 
newspaper  writing.  A  few  years  later  he  was 
working  as  a  printer  in  New  York,  and  later 


246      GREAT  AMERICAN  WRITERS 

in  Philadelphia.  Returning  to  the  Missis 
sippi  Valley  he  determined  to  be  a  river  pilot, 
and  after  earning  the  necessary  fee  for  in 
struction,  in  less  than  two  years  he  qualified 
with  sufficient  skill  to  navigate  between  New 
Orleans  and  St.  Louis.  This  part  of  his  life 
he  has  told  in  Life  on  the  Mississippi,  1883. 

After  a  brief  army  experience,  which  he 
himself  has  humorously  described,  Mark 
Twain  went  to  Nevada,  where  a  brother  of 
his  was  Secretary  of  the  Territory.  Here  in 
1862  he  began  to  write  articles  under  the  pen- 
name  by  which  he  is  now  known,  and  repub- 
lished  them  in  the  Virginia  City  Enterprise. 
Appreciative  members  of  the  editorial  staff 
encouraged  his  singular  gifts  of  drollery,  and 
in  1865  he  was  invited  to  a  position  on  the 
San  Francisco  Call.  He  made  the  change, 
and  soon  found  himself  launched  on  his 
literary  success.  He  collected  his  Jumping 
Frog  and  other  newspaper  sketches,  in  1867, 
and  the  reputation  they  got  for  him  caused 
several  newspapers  to  send  him  abroad  with 
a  party  of  tourists,  that  he  might  report  the 
trip  humorously.  The  result  was  Innocents 
Abroad,  1869,  which  firmly  established  his 
American  fame.  This  volume  may  well  be 
taken  as  the  last  successful  example  of  the 
old  extravagant  American  humor. 

In  1870  Mark  Twain  married  Miss  Olivia 


BRET  HARTE  AND  MARK  TWAIN    247 

Langdon,  of  Elmira,  New  York,  and  settled 
for  a  while  in  Buffalo,  then  for  many  years 
in  Hartford.  He  published  volumes  at  fre 
quent  intervals,  which  for  the  most  part 
were  in  the  old  extravagant  vein  and  have 
already  been  forgotten.  But  in  1876,  with 
The  Adventures  of  Tom  Sawyer,  began  that 
all  too  brief  series  of  American  scenes,  of 
which  the  other  books  are  The  Adventures  of 
Huckleberry  Finn,  1885;  Pudd'nhead  Wilson, 
1894;  and  The  Man  that  Corrupted  Hadley- 
burg,  1900.  The  first  of  these  won  him  his 
reputation  in  England,  where  Innocents 
Abroad  could  hardly  be  appreciated.  To 
value  any  of  these  later  stories  at  their  true 
greatness,  the  critic  must  consider  their 
author  as  something  far  more  than  a  fun- 
maker. 

Long  before  this  series  was  finished,  how 
ever,  Mark  Twain  had  suffered  that  severe 
financial  loss  which  served  to  reveal  his 
strength  of  character.  He  had  invested 
heavily  in  a  publishing  house  which  in  1894 
failed  for  a  large  sum  of  money.  This  he 
assumed  as  a  personal  debt.  The  old- 
fashioned  sense  of  honor  which  prompted 
his  resolution  to  make  a  lecture  tour  of  the 
world,  and  the  courage  with  which  he  carried 
out  the  plan,  are  the  chief  causes  why  he  is 
so  dearly  loved  by  Americans.  Bret  Harte 


248      GREAT  AMERICAN  WRITERS 

disappointed  his  countrymen,  but  Mark 
Twain  was  a  large  asset  of  national  pride. 
It  naturally  took  nothing  from  the  merit 
of  his  action  that  he  thoroughly  disliked 
lecturing,  and  before  his  losses  he  had  re 
solved  never  to  lecture  again.  His  trip  around 
the  world  was  a  delight  to  his  audiences. 
Who  that  ever  heard  him  can  forget  his 
unique  drollery !  When  he  returned  his  debts 
were  paid. 

His  later  years  were  filled  with  public 
honor  and  private  sorrow.  The  deaths  of 
two  daughters  and  of  his  wife  almost  unset 
tled  his  faith  in  any  comfort  or  profit  in  this 
world  or  another.  Even  before  these  griefs 
the  tragic  note  had  been  struck  in  Pudd'n- 
head  Wilson,  and  his  story  of  Hadleyburg 
was  cynically  wise.  In  his  lesser  writing 
during  these  years  he  often  forced  the  note 
of  humor  back  into  his  old  extravagances, 
and  where  they  could  not  laugh,  his  affec 
tionate  readers  admired  the  courage  that  so 
tried  to  conceal  a  sad  heart.  He  died  at  his 
home  in  Redding,  Connecticut,  April  21, 1910. 

Mark  Twain  is  more  certain  of  remem 
brance  as  a  novelist  than  as  a  humorist. 
With  changes  of  culture  and  taste  his  humor 
— at  least  many  sections  of  it — will  prob 
ably  recede  beyond  general  appreciation. 
Had  he  no  other  qualities,  he  might  even 


BRET  HARTE  AND  MARK  TWAIN    249 

now  begin  to  take  his  place  with  the  jokers 
out  of  fashion,  like  Josh  Billings  or  Artemus 
Ward.  But  beginning  with  The  Adventures 
of  Tom  Sawyer  he  showed  himself  to  be  a 
novelist  of  the  first  rank,  a  painter  of  manners 
and  customs,  a  remarkable  analyzer  of 
character,  a  master  of  dramatic  plot.  That 
book  proved  his  phenomenal  understanding 
of  the  American  small  boy,  and  of  those 
aspects  of  human  nature  which  expand  in 
the  small,  wide-settled  villages  of  inland 
America.  The  tramp,  the  loafer,  the  peddler, 
all  the  local  characters  that  might  have 
significance  in  the  eyes  of  the  small  boy,  are 
represented  with  fascinating  realism,  as- 
well  as  the  more  respectable  but  less  inter 
esting  domestic  characters — but  all  of  them 
viewed  at  all  times  through  the  eyes  of  the 
urchin. 

Even  in  the  story  of  Tom  Sawyer  Mark 
Twain  suggested  a  certain  tragic  contrast 
between  the  boy's  simple  point  of  view  and 
the  things  that  he  saw  but  did  not  under 
stand.  In  The  Adventures  of  Huckleberry 
Finn  this  note  of  elemental  tragedy  is  in 
creased  until  certain  passages,  such  as  the 
relation  of  Huckleberry  to  his  father,  and 
the  episode  of  the  Southern  feud,  would  be 
hard  to  overmatch  in  any  literature.  The 
effect  is  to  subdue  the  fun  somewhat;  the 


250      GREAT  AMERICAN  WRITERS 

book  is  not  so  popular  as  Tom  Sawyer  with 
those  who  expect  mere  laughter  from  Mark 
Twain.  Still  less  fun  is  in  Pudd'nhead  Wilson. 
If  it  were  not  for  the  quotations  from  Pudd'n- 
head's  diary,  a  laugh  could  hardly  be  found 
in  this  grim  drama  of  a  slave-holding  society. 

The  Man  that  Corrupted  Hadleyburg  is 
quite  the  keenest  arraignment  that  Ameri 
can  character  has  yet  had.  It  would  not 
lessen  the  bitterness  of  the  satire  were  we  to 
consider  it  directed  not  at  one  country  but 
at  human  nature.  And  in  any  case  the  sup 
position  cannot  be  made,  for  Mark  Twain's 
ability  to  portray  his  countrymen  so  that 
they  could  recognize  themselves  improved 
every  year  of  his  life.  This  fine  story,  so 
bitter  and  so  true,  is  evidence  not  only  of 
disappointments  that  had  taken  away  his 
joy  in  life,  but  also  of  that  fine  morality  that 
cannot  withhold  contempt  from  the  occa 
sional  vulgar  meanness  of  democratic  man.  ' 

That  the  best  critical  appraisers  of  Amer 
ica's  virtues  and  failings  should  be  found 
among  the  most  distinctively  national  and 
loyal  of  her  sons,  such  as  Lowell  and  Mark 
Twain,  is  an  augury  for  her  ordered  progress 
in  all  things,  and  an  encouraging  thought 
with  which  to  close  this  brief  record  of  her 
chief  achievements  in  literature. 


BIBLIOGRAPHY 


HISTORIES  OP  AMERICAN  LITERATURE:  Brander  Matthews,  1896;  K.  L. 
Bates,  1898;  B.  Wendell,  1900;  W.  C.  Bronson,  1900;  G.  E.  Woodberry, 
1903;  W.  P.  Trent,  1903. 

GENERAL  AND  SPECIAL  STUDIES:  A  History  of  American  Literature  during  the 
Colonial  Time,  2  vols.,  1878,  and  The  Literary  History  of  the  American 
Revolution,  2  vols.,  1897,  by  M.  C.  Tyler.  Poets  of  America,  E.  C.  Sted- 
man,  1885.  The  Philadelphia  Magazines  and  their  Contributors,  A.  H. 
Smyth,  1892.  Old  Cambridge,  T.  W.  Higginson,  1899.  The  Clergy  in 
American  Life  and  Letters,  D.  D.  Addison,  1900.  Literary  Friends  and 
Acquaintances,  W.  D.  Howells,  1900.  American  Prose  Masters,  W.  C. 
Brownell,  1909.  Leading  American  Essayists,  W.M.Payne,  1910.  Lead 
ing  American  Novelists,  J.  Erskine,  1910.  A  History  of  American  Verse, 
J.L.Onderdonk,  1901. 

ANTHOLOGIES:  Cyclopedia  of  American  Literature,  E.  A.  and  G.  L.  Duyckinck, 
2  vols.,  1855,  3rd  enlarged  ed.,  1875.  Library  of  American  Literature, 
E.  C.  Stedman  and  E.  M.  Hutchinson,  11  vols.,  1888-1890.  American 
Prose,  G.  R.  Carpenter,  1898.  An  American  Anthology,  E.  C.  Stedman, 

1900.  Colonial  Prose  and  Poetry,  W.  P.  Trent  and  B.  W.  Wells,  3  vols., 

1901.  Southern  Writers,  W.  P.  Trent,  1905. 

CHAP.  I.  Woolman,  Journal  and  Other  Writings,  1883.  Edwards,  Works, 
4  vols.,  1852;  Life,  by  Rev.  A.  V.  G.  Allen,  1889.  Franklin,  Works,  ed. 
J.  Bigclow,  10  vols.,  1887-1838;  Life,  by  J.  B.  McMaster,  1887.  Brockden 
Brown's  novels,  6  vols.,  1887;  Life,  by  W.  Dunlap,  2  vols.,  1815.  Irving, 
Life  and  Letters,  by  P.  M.  Irving,  4  vols.,  1862-1864. 

CHAP.  II.  Bryant,  Poems,  ed.  Parke  Godwin,  2  vols.,  1883;  Prose,  2  vols., 
1884;  Life,  by  J.  Bigelow,  1890.  Halleck,  Poetical  Writings,  ed.  J.  G. 
Wilson,  1869;  Life  and  Letters,  by  J.  G.  Wilson,  1869  (this  reference  also 
for  Drake). 

CHAP.  III.  Cooper,  'Life,  by  T.  R.  Lounsbury,  1883.  Simmg,  Life,  by 
W.  P.  Trent,  1892.  Melville,  principal  novels,  4  vols.,  1892. 

CHAP.  IV.  Hawthorne,  Riverside  Edition,  12  vols.,  1882;  Life,  by  Henry 
James,  1879;  by  M.  D.  Conway,  1890;  by  G.  E.  Woodberry,  1902;U 
Study  of  Nathaniel  Hawthorne,  by  G.  P.  Lathrop,'1876;  Nathaniel  Haw 
thorne  and  His  Wife,  by  J.  Hawthorne,  2  vols.,  1885;  Memories  of  Haw 
thorne,  by  Rose  Hawthorne  Lathrop,  1893. 

CHAP.  V.  Poe,  Works,  Stedman- Woodberry  Edition,  10  vols.,  1894-1895; 
Virginia  Edition,  ed.  by  J.  A.  Harrison,  17  vols.,  1902;  Life,  by  G.  E. 
Woodberry,  1885;  the  same  enlarged,  2  vols.,  1909;  by  J.  A.  Harrison 
(Virginia  Edition,  vol.  1),  1902. 

CHAP.  VI.  Emerson,  Centenary  Edition,  12  vols.,  1903;  Journals  6  vols. 
1909-1911;  Life,  by  J.  E.  Cabot,  2  vols.,  1887;  by  R.  Garnett,  1888;  by 
G.  E.  Woodberry,  1905.  Thoreau,  Walden  Edition,  20  vols.,  1906; 
Life,  by  W.  E.  Channing,  2nd,  1873,  1902;  by  F.  B.  Sanborn,  1882. 
Alcott,  Memoir,  by  F.  B.  Sauborn  and  W.  T.  Harris,  2  vols.,  1893. 
Margaret  Fuller,  Life,  by  Emerson,1  W.  HJChanning,  and  Clarke  3  vols 
1852;  by  T.  W.  Higginson,  1884.  Parker,  Works,  14  vols.,  London,  1863^ 
1865;  Life  and  Correspondence,  ed.  J.  Weiss,  2  vols.,  1864.  See  also 
Brook  Farm,  by  Lindsay  Swift,  1900;  Transcendentalism  in  New  Eng 
land,  O.  B.  Frothiugham,  1876;  Studies  in  New  England  Transcenden 
talism,  by  H.  C.  Goddard,  1908;  reprint  of  The  Dial,  by  the  Rowfant 
Club,  Chicago,  1902. 

251 


252  BIBLIOGRAPHY 

CHAP.  VII.  Longfellow,  Riverside  Edition,  11  vols.,  1886;  Life,  by  S.  Long 
fellow,  3  vols.,  1891.  Whittier,  Riverside  Edition,  7  yols.,  1892;  Life 
and  Letters,  by  S.  T.  Pickard,  2  vols.,  1894.  Holmes,  Riverside  Edition, 
13  vols.,  1892;  Life  and  Letters,  by  J.  T.  Morse,  2  vols.,  1896.  Lowell, 
Riverside  Edition,  11  vols.,  1890;  Letters,  ed.  C.  E.  Norton,  2  vols., 
1893;  Life,  by  H.  E.  Scudder,  2  vols.,  1901.  Willis,  Poems,  1868;  Prose, 
13  yols.,  1849-1859;  Life,  by  H.  A.  Beers,  1885. 

CHAP.  VIII.  Sparks,  Life  and  Writings,  ed.  H.  B.  Adams,  2  vols.,  1893. 
Bancroft,  Life  and  Letters,  ed.  M.  A.  DeW.  Howe,  2  vols.,  1908. 
Prescott,  Works,  ed.  by  J.  F.  Kirk,  16  vols.,  1870-1874;  Life,  by  G. 
Ticknor,  1864.  Motley,  Works,  9  vols.,  1903-1904;  Letters,  ed.  G.  W. 
Curtis,  2  vols.,  1889;  Life,  by  O.  W.  Holmes,  1879.  Parkman,  Life,  by 
C.  H.  Farnham,  1900.  Curtis,  Orations  and  Addresses,  ed.  C.  E.  Norton, 
3  vols.,  1894;  Life,  by  E.  Cary,  1894. 

CHAP.  IX.  Webster,  Works,  6  vols.,  1851;  Life,  by  G.  T.  Curtis,  2  vols., 
1870;  by  H.  C.  Lodge,  1883;  by  J.  B.  McMaster,  1902.  Lincoln,  Works, 
ed.  Nicolay  and  Hay,  2  vols.,  1894. 

CHAP.  X.  Mrs.  Stowe,  Riverside  Edition,  17  vols.,  1897  (includes  the  Life 
and  Letters,  by  Mrs.  Annie  Fields);  Life,  by  C.  E.  Stowe,  1889. 

CHAP.  XI.  Whitman,  Works,  10  vols.,  1902;  Life,  by  Dr.  R.  M.  Bucke,  1883; 
Whitman:  A  Study,  by  J.  Burroughs,  1896. 

CHAP.  XII.  Bret  Harte,  Riverside  Edition,  19  vols.,  1903;  Life,  by  T.  E. 
Pemberton,  London,  1 903 ;  by  H .  C .  Merwin ,  1911.  Mark  Twain,  Works, 
25  vols.,  1910;  Life,  by  A.  B.  Paine,  Harper' a  Maaazine,  Nov.  1911-. 


INDEX 


Adams,  Henry,  172. 

Adventures  of  Huckleberry  Finn,  The, 

247,  249,  250. 
Adventures  of  Tom  Sawyer,  The,  247, 

249. 

Al  Araaf,  87,  92. 
Alcott,   Amos    Bronson,    109,    120, 

121,  122,  131,  132-134. 
Alcott,  Louisa  M.,  133. 
Alcuin,  16,  19. 

Aldrich,  Thomas  Bailey,  231. 
Alhambra,  The,  23. 
Allston,  Washington,  28. 
American  Scholar,  The,  118. 
Among  My  Books,  164. 
Annabel  Lee,  107. 
"Artemus     Ward."     See     Browne, 

Charles  Farrar. 
Arthur  Mervyn,  16,  18. 
Atlantic  Monthly,  The,  153,  162,  236. 
Autobiography  (Franklin's),  7,  11. 
Autocrat  of  the  Breakfast  Table,  The, 

151,  154,  157. 

Bancroft,  George,  24,  68,  170-172, 

186. 

Barbara  Frietchie,  144. 
Barlow,  Joel,  12. 
Beecher.    See  Stowe. 
Bells,  The,  92,  107. 
Benjamin,  Park,  177. 
Beverley,  Robert,  169. 
Biglow  papers,  tThe,  159-160,  163, 

164. 

Bird,  Dr.  Robert  M.,  51. 
Black  Cat,  The,  90. 
Blithedale  Romance,  The,  81. 
Bracebridge  Hall,  22. 
Bradford,  William,  169. 
Bravo,  The,  50. 
Bridge,  The,  140,  141. 
Brook  Farm,  70,  81,  82,  121-123, 

128. 

Brooks,  Maria  Gowen,  37. 
Brown,    Charles    Brockden,    12-20, 

38. 

Browne,  Charles  Farrar,  245,  249. 
Brownell,  Henry  Howard,  224. 
Bryant,  William  Cullen,  25,  27-35, 

36. 
Byron,  George  Gordon,  29,  42,  151. 


Cable,  George  Washington,  245. 
Calhoun,  John  C.,  188. 
Carlyle,  Thomas,  114,  116,  126,  132. 
Cask  of  Amontillado,  The,  97. 
Chambered  Nautilus,  The,  156. 
Channing,  Rev.  William  Ellery,  109. 
Channing,  William  Ellery,  Jr.,  71, 

134. 

Charlotte  Temple,  12. 
Clara  Howard,  19. 
Clay,  Henry,  143,  188. 
Clemens,   Samuel   Langhorne,   232, 

244-250. 
Coleridge,  Samuel  Taylor,  28,  105, 

114,  138,  151. 
Compensation,  123,  219. 
Conquest  of  Grenada,  73. 
Conspiracy  of  Pontiac,  The,  184. 
Cooper,  James  Fenimore,  19,  25,  27, 

31,  36,  38-51,  53,  54,  57,  203. 
Courtship   of  Miles   Standish,    The, 

139. 

Cowper,  William,  28,  30. 
Cranch,  Christopher  Pearse,  134. 
Crevecoeur,  J.  H.  St.  John  de,  7. 
Culprit  Fay,  The,  36. 
Curtis,  George  William,  179. 

Dana,  Richard  Henry,  Sr.,  28. 

Dante,  213;  Longfellow's  transla 
tion,  141,  229;  Parsons'  transla 
tion,  168. 

David  Swan,  62. 

Day  is  done,  The,  140. 

Deer  slayer,  The,  46,  48. 

Derby,  George  Horatio,  232. 

Descent  into  the  Maelstrom,  The,  89, 
98,  100. 

Dial,  The,  69,  120-121,  132,  133. 

Dickens,  Charles,  105,  241. 

Dr.  Heidegger's  Experiment,  63. 

Dolliver  Romance,  The,  84. 

Drake,  Joseph  Rodman,  35. 

Drcd,  206-210. 

Drum  Taps,  214. 

Dryden,  John,  8,  161. 

Dwight,  Timothy,  28. 

Edgar  Huntly,  16,  18,  19. 
Edwards,  Rev.  Jonathan,  7. 
Elsie  Venner,  154,  155,  157. 


253 


254 


INDEX 


Emerson,  Ralph  Waldo.'Q,  25/64, 
65,  71,  109,  110-126,  128,  129, 
130,  131,  135,  147,  215,  217,  219, 
220. 

Endicott  and  the  Red  Croat,  77. 

English  Traits,  125. 

Eulalie,  107. 

Eureka,  92. 

Eutaw,  54. 

Evangeline,  139,  140. 

Everett,  Edward,  186,  187-188. 

Excelsior,  138. 

Fable  for  Critics,  A,  28,  160-162. 

Faust,  14;  Taylor's  translation,  229. 

Fields,  James  T.,  75. 

Fiske,  John,  172. 

Flood  of  Years,  The,  32. 

Forest  Hymn,  A,  35. 

Franklin,  Benjamin,  7-12,  15,  170, 

194. 

Freneau,  Philip,  12,  27. 
Fringed  Gentian,  To  the,  35. 
Fuller,  Margaret.     See  Ossoli. 

Garrison,  William  Lloyd,  142. 
Gayarre,  Charles  E.,  172. 
Gentle  Boy,  The,  59. 
Georgia  Scenes,  232. 
Gettysburg  Address,  195. 
Gilder,  Richard  Watson,  231. 
Godwin,  William,  12,  13,  14,  16,  18. 
Goodrich,  Samuel  Griswold,  59,  60. 
Gray  Champion,  The,  60,  61. 
Greeley,  Horace,  91,  132. 
Griswold,  Rev.  Rufus  W.,  93,  161. 
Guardian  Angel,  The,  155. 
Guy  Mannering,  13. 
Guy  Rivers,  53. 

Hail  Columbia,  28. 

Halleck,  Fitz-Greene,  35. 

Hans  Pfall,  98. 

Harris,  Joel  Chandler,  245. 

Harte,  Bret,  203,  232-244. 

Haunted  Palace,  The,  107. 

Hawthorne,  Nathaniel,  17,  25,  67- 
84,  94,  105,  144,  241. 

Hayne,  Paul  Hamilton,  228. 

Hayne,  Robert  Y.,  188. 

Headsman,  The,  50. 

Heidenmauer,  The,  50. 

Helen,  To,  36,  107. 

Henry,  Patrick,  187. 

Hiawatha,  139,  140. 

Hildreth,  Richard,  172. 

Hillhouse,  James  Abraham,  28. 

History  of  New  York  (Knicker 
bocker),  21. 

Hoffman,  Charles  Fenno,  51. 

Holmes,  Oliver  Wendell,  25,  34, 
149-158. 

Homer  (Bryaat's  translation) ,  33, 229. 


Hopkinson,  Joseph,  28. 

House  of  the  Seven  Gables,  The,  79- 

81. 

Howe's  Masquerade,  60,  61. 
Howells,  William  Dean,  244. 
Hutchinson,  Thomas,  168. 
Hyperion,  137. 

Ichabod,  146,  149,  193. 

Imp  of  the  Perverse,  The,  102. 

Indian,   American,   14,   18,   19,  38, 

47,  53,  203. 
Irving,  Washington,  20-27,  35,  36, 

62,  137,  170. 
Israfel,  107. 
Ivanhoe,  43. 

James,  Henry,  Sr.,  134. 

James,  Henry,  Jr.,  245. 

Jane  Talbot,  20. 

Jewett,  Sarah  Orne,  201. 

"John       Phoenix."    See       Derby, 

George  Horatio. 
"Josh  Billings."    See  Shaw,  Henry 

Wheeler. 

Journal  (Woolman's),  7. 
Judd,  Rev.  Sylvester,  134. 
Jumping  Frog,  The,  246. 

Katherine  Walton,  54. 

Keats,  John,  29,  36,  138,  151,  158, 

168. 
Key,  Francis  Scott,  28. 

Lanier,  Sidney,  229-231. 
Last  Leaf,  The,  150,  156. 
Last  of  the  Mohicans,  The,  41,  46, 

48-49. 

Lea,  Henry  Charles,  173. 
Leatherstocking,  27,  43,  47. 
Leaves  of  Grass,  25,  213. 
Legeia,  97. 

Legend  of  Sleepy  Hollow,  The,  22. 
Life,   Letters   and   Journals    (Tick- 

nor's),  186. 
Life  of  Washington    (Irving's),   24, 

25;   (Marshall's),  170. 
Lincoln,  Abraham,  149,  194-197. 
Longfellow,  Henry  \Vadsworth,  23, 

25,  36,  58,  91,  94,  105,  135-142, 

147,  148,  151,  156. 
Longstreet,  Augustus  Baldwin,  232. 
Lowell,  James  Russell,  25,  28,  29, 

91,  94,  148,  156,  158-167. 
Luck  of  Roaring  Camp,  The,  235. 

McMaster,  John  Bach,  172. 
Major  Jones's  Courtship,  232. 
Man    that    Corrupted    Hadleyburg, 

The,  247,  250. 
Marble  Faun,  The,  82-84. 
"Mark      Twain."     See      Clemens, 

Samuel  Langhorne. 


INDEX 


255 


Marshall,  John,  170. 

Masque  of  the  Red  Death,  The,  97. 

Maud  Muller,  146. 

Melville,  Herman,  51,  55-57. 

Minister's  Wooing,  The,  201,  210- 

211. 

Moby  Dick,  56. 

Montcalm  and  Wolfe,  184,  185. 
Morella,  96. 

Mortal  Antipathy,  A,  155. 
Motley,   John   Lothrop,    173,   176- 

180,  186. 

MS.  Found  in  a  Bottle,  The,  88,  98. 
Murders  in  the  Rue  Morgue,  The,  89, 

98,  100. 
My  Study  Windows,  164. 

Nature,  115-118,  123,  124/126. 

Neal,  John,  37. 

North  American  Review,  The,  30. 

0  Captain,  My  Captain,  222. 

Old  Iron/tides,  150. 

Oldtown  Folks,  201. 

Omoo,  56. 

One  in  Paradise,  To,  107. 

Oregon  Trail,  The,  182. 

Ormond,  16,  17. 

Ossoli,    Margaret   Fuller,    71,    109, 

120,  121,  122, 131-132. 
Outcasts  of  Poker  Flat,  The,  236. 
Outre-Mer,  137. 

Parker,  Rev.  Theodore,  120. 
Parkman,  Francis,   173,   176,   181- 

186. 

Parsons,  Thomas  William,  168 
Partisan,  The,  53. 
Pathfinder,  The,  41,  47. 
PfUUoing,  James  Kirk,  53. 
Peabody,  Elizabeth,  67,  69,  120. 
Peacock,  Thomas  Love,  14,  18. 
Percival,  James  Gates,  37. 
"Peter     Parley."     See     Goodrich, 

Samuel  Griswokl. 
Phillips,  Wendell,  188-189. 
Philosophy  of  Composition,  The,  95, 

98,  105. 

Pierce,  Franklin,  38,  82,  84. 
Pike,  Albert,  168. 
Pilot,  The,  41,  44-45. 
Pinkney,  Edward  Coate,  37. 
Pioneers,  The,  19,  39,  41,  47. 
Pirate,  The,  44. 
Poe,  Edgar  Allan,   17,  25,  36,  85- 

108,  147,  149,  156,  167,  212,  240, 

241. 

Poetic  Principle,  The,  104. 
Poor  Richard's  Almanac,  11. 
Prairie,  The,  41,  47,  4!). 
Prescott,  William  Hickley,  173-176. 
Professor    at    the    Breakfast    Table, 

The,  154. 


Proud,  Robert,  14. 
Psalm  of  Life,  A,  137. 
Pudd'nhead  Wilson,  247,  250 

Radcliffe,  Anne,  12. 

Rationale  of  Verse,  The,  105. 

Raven,  The,  91,  92,  95,  98,  108 

Reply  to  Hayne,  189,  192,  193 

Representative  Men,  126. 

Rhodes,  James  Ford,  172. 

Rill  from  the  Town  Pump,  A,  62, 

Ripley,  Rev.  Ezra,  71,  110,  114,  127. 

Ripley,  George,  120,  134. 

Rip  Van  Winkle,  22,  26. 

Rise  of  the  Dutch  Republic,  177. 

Roger  Malvin's  Burial,  59. 

Rosetti,  Dante  Gabriel,  107,  108. 

Rowson,  Susanna,  12. 

Salmagundi,  21. 

Scarlet  Letter,   The,  74-78,  79,  82, 

83,  219. 

Schouler,  James,  172. 
Scott,  Sir  Walter,   13,  31,  42,  43, 

46,  54,  61,  143,  153. 
Sedgwick,  Catherine  Maria,  51. 
Self-Reliance,  123. 
Shaw,  Henry  Wheeler,  249. 
Shelley,  Percy  Bysshe,  14,   18,   102, 

151. 

Sigourney,  Lydia  Huntley,  37. 
Sill,  Edward  Rowland,  231. 
Simms,    William    Gilmore,    51-55, 

56,  168. 

Skeleton  in  Armor,  The,  138. 
Sketch-Book,  The,  22,  23. 
Snow-Bound,  142,  144,  148.   :'; 
Snow  Image,  The,  73. 
Southey,  Robert,  37. 
Sparks,  Rev.  Jared,  170. 
Spectre  Bridegroom,  The,  22. 
Spy,  The,  31,  40,  41-44. 
Star-Spanulcd  Banner,  The,  28. 
Stedman,  Edmund  Clarence,  231. 
Stevenson,  Robert  Louis,  57. 
Stowe,    Harriet    Beecher,    25,    55, 

197-211. 

Tabb,  John  Banister,  231. 
Tales  of  a  Traveller,  23. 
Tales  of  a  Wayside  Inn,  140. 
Tamerlane  and  Other  Poems,  87. 
Taylor,  Bayard,  229. 
Tennessee's  Partner,  236. 
Tennyson,  Alfred,  105, 135, 151, 156. 
Thanatopsis,  30,  32,  33. 
Thoreau,  Henry  David,  25,  64,  110, 

121,  126-131. 

Ticknor,  George,  137,  186,  187. 
Timrod,  Henry,  228. 
Transcendentalism,    9,    64,    65,    70, 

108-134,  153,  158. 
Trumbull,  John,  12. 


256 


INDEX 


Twice-Told  Talet,  60-67,  72. 
Typee,  56. 

Ulalume,  107. 

Uncle  Tom's  Cabin,  144,  200,  201, 
202-206. 

Very,  Rev.  Jones,  134. 
Village  Blacksmith,  The,  138. 
Vision  of  Sir  Launfal,  The,  160. 
Voices  of  the  Night,  137. 

Wakefield,  63. 
Walden,  126,  128. 
Waterfowl,  To  a,  31,  34. 
Webster,  Daniel,  149,  189-194. 
Week  on  the  Concord,  A,  129. 


Whitman,  Walt,  25,  212-228. 
Whittier,  John  Greenleaf,  25,  142- 

149,  156. 
Wieland,  16,  17. 
Wilde,  Richard  Henry,  28. 
Wilkins-Freeman,  Mary,  201. 
William  Wilson,  102, 
Willis,  Nathaniel  Parker,  90,   135, 

136,  167. 
Woodcraft,  54. 
Woodworth,  Samuel,  28. 
Woolman,  John,  7. 
Wordsworth,   William,     29,  30,  31, 

34,  114,  151,  221,  224. 

Yellow  Violet,  The,  SL 
Yemassee,  The,  53.  .. 


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